The smiley face can be avoided by putting an empty tag between the quotation mark and the end of the parenthesis, like this:
[code type=markup]
(testing quote "like this"[ b ][ /b ])
[/code](Spaces were added to the bold tag to get it to display. I would have thought that the code tag was enough to stop it from parsing the bold tag...)

Which yields this:
(testing quote "like this")

I absolutely know how to do this (your suggestion) - I've used it before as a workaround for other things - but when you're typing a response - you don't want to have to go through this. Even Yamaha employees have unintended smileys due to this. The easiest way for me is just to add the space. But that's still a drag.

Within the editor there are 6 smiley face icons. None of them output double quote plus parenthesis. It'd be great if this one smiley (one without even an icon to generate) was taken away due to frequency of use. Even Yamaha support has posts where they're "bit" by this.

... other forums allow for you to turn off generating smileys altogether. That'd work for me. If I could set my profile to turn off smileys for each post - that'd be great.

For the time being, I'll use the "light lift" - remember to add a space. Go back and EDIT if I forget and add the space. Still, I'll continue to ask/remind as I see the forum going through changes for other things.

Right on all points.

I didn't intend to suggest ignorance on your part, nor did I intend to minimize the issue here. This forum software is atrocious, that much is certain.

For me and my obsessive personality, I can't stand leaving spaces between " and ) in my posts. Throwing in the empty tag makes for a more comfortable mechanism to cope with the poor software, personally. Maybe someone else reading might have the same inclination and might benefit from having this other workaround outlined. Yamaha employees themselves might even prefer it, so as to best maintain an appearance of good copy editing.

Best regards, and here's to hoping for better software. Thanks for fighting the good fight.

No problem, any fight was squarely directed at the forum infrastructure itself (not necessarily even Yamaha's control for all of it - outsourced).

The start of this was actually just to have a message I could go back and look to see if hyperlinks could be told apart from regular text. Which last month they could have been. Subtle, but different. Now - not so different. Good luck finding that link unless someone decided to work around it and put a [ u] [ /u] around it.