My bad, I meant more plain words are unclaimed/available for register. It's more likely name@xmr.id registered as you were operating for years, if someone specifically want to get their name as alias, it could be useful for them. Emoji support was something I plan for the future, I'll think about punycode. I'm not sure people would like to use non ascii characters (beside emojis) though.
Thank you for getting one of first aliases! Wallet update feature will be added to dashboard soon. I'm working on it right now. (edit: added this feature, you can follow https://xmr.ist/changelog for updates)
I also couldn't figure out how to use OpenAlias on Cake wallet.
Main functionality is same, both provides you OpenAlias. As my website is new, more aliases are available to register. Also it's cheaper. Apart from OpenAlias, I plan to introduce some features for subdomain.
Thank you for mentioning my service!