Relatively speaking, it is easy. That isn't to say that a complete beginner could do it in 2 mins. But an experienced scripter could probably do it in less. Depending on how flexible you would want it to be, it could be done with as few as 2 /commands. Compare that to, say, socket scripting, which can take over a dozen lines just to download a page from a website, and that's without actually doing anything with the page you retrieved. When it comes to writing full-featured addons, it is not uncommon to run into the hundreds of lines. No, changing the dividers around nicks is relatively easy.
My argument in favor of this feature is that it is difficult to preserve spaces within incoming text, and, to my knowlege, impossible where outgoing text is concerned. Normally, extra spaces are not important, but it would be nice to be able to put the usual two spaces after the . at the end of a sentence, among other things.
Personally, I would prefer to see some special &binvars for raw text be introduced, and switches to /msg, /notice, /echo, perhaps /raw, to allow direct output of &binvars without losing spaces, as I'm sure I could come up with a use for that in other things. But if it comes down to that, or an option for changing <nick> to something else, I would bet that the general opinion (outside of these forums) is in favor of the latter.
