I'll give some explanations (mostly personal opinion here, not necessarily the collective admin opinion on the matter) about the ratings changes since people are apparently bothered by them. I should note that I didn't actually take much part in this discussion in the admin chat, I just read what had been said and shrugged and agreed because it sounded good. I don't really care much about the ratings system so I didn't have any interest in going in depth on the matter, even in private, until this thread popped up.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the reason some ratings were removed. It's not a matter of "we can only have 9 ratings" or anything, it was a matter of us taking a look at the ratings and deciding independently whether or not any of them should be removed. The talk of removal and adding new ones were all jumbled up together and it just so happened that we ended up removing two and adding two (or in reality replacing one and then removing one and adding a different thing).
The "you need a hug" was alternately used to express sadness/condolences and for sarcastic/snarky ways of saying someone is being a shit and needs to stop. The new T_T is a replacement that retains the first use without being so easily twisted into a salt-inducing sarcastic rating, thus making it better for the general goal of giving people post ratings while minimizing uses that cause dumb problems. Also, this emoji makes it a lot more clear to newcomers what the hell it's supposed to be used for than the facehugger was.
The cookie rating was entirely extraneous. More than half of the ratings are varying degrees of "This is a good post, I like it," and when the cookie was there it was 2/3 of all ratings. Like is exactly what it says, love is more intense liking of a post, thank is saying thanks for the good post, useful is saying the post was good and useful, nice execution basically also says it's a good post, and bucket of rainbows is a generic positive vibes rating that can be used whenever the others don't feel quite right. The cookie served no real purpose not already fulfilled by the others, seeing as it had basically the same exact use cases as bucket of rainbows, but it also had some snark applications (ie the same way people say "what, do you want a cookie or something?" when someone talks about accomplishing something unimpressive). It was less obvious than the snarky applications of the facehugger, but still there, and I've seen many people complain about it being used on their posts in such a way (including some people saying they hate receiving cookie ratings on their posts because they can never tell if it's sincere or not).
The new rofl rating was meant not to replace the function of the cookie, but to fill a hole in the ratings system that has received tons of complaints over the years. "Give us some kind of laughter rating" has been the #1 requested thing in regards to ratings since... hell, since I joined the site I think. We've had no rating to say "that's funny," just varying shades of like to sort of say it, and recently the nice execution rating has sort of filled that purpose. It's a worthwhile thing to have, totally independent of the other changes made.
Also, now that I HAVE taken an in-depth look at the ratings, frankly I am of the opinion that we have too many. Were I given full control of the dumb things I would remove two or three more and not replace them. Bucket of rainbows is extraneous, the like rating can easily fill the role of generic positivity. The go home you're drunk rating is frequently used in a negative or insulting fashion, therefore it should probably be removed. Nice execution is now pushed into redundancy since we have a rofl rating, because now it's just another of the group of things that mean "I like this post" to some degree, so I would probably get rid of that one as well even though I like using it instead of the like or love or whatever. I definitely like the idea of keeping ratings to a minimum and telling people to just write a fucking post or PM to tell a person what they want to say if it's more nuanced than "I like this post" or "this post made me laugh," and chopping it down to 6 ratings that each have clear and functional meanings would be ideal.
You're all welcome for my lack of giving a shit about the rating system btw, because I didn't bother saying this stuff in the admin chat about the issue and I'm not gonna bother pushing for these removals now even though I think it would be a good thing. Writing this post has tapped all of the small amount of my give-a-fuck reserves that could be spared for this topic. 8D