I feel the same way; but, as I stated in the last paragraph of my last post, I don't think such extension will ever happen; it would have happened by now.
That's why i'm trying to make it happen. Although it's likely that nothing will happen because too many people are against it, not enough people care about it or something else, posting on the three most popular websites related to the most popular irc client isn't a bad start.
If people like the ideas then i'll start posting on forums related to other clients also.
I nearly forgot about the other two suggestions.
Necroman suggested:
When you join a channel the server will send the last five messages from the channel to you as raw messages (sent as raw messages so the client can easily hide this feature should the user not want it) so you can catch up.
I suggest receiving a raw when someone goes away or returns (i'm aware it's in some ircds already)
