I feel I should clarify my point so as not to be misunderstood.
In the discussion tidy_trax mentioned, I only drew his (and other people's) attention to the fact the IRC could and should be improving. It's not because it's bad in its current shape, it's just all technologies either improve or die, and there's no other choice in the long run.
In order for IRC to improve, it needs 2 things.
First, there should be a discussion. There should be ideas and people behind them. Right now I see no brainstorming whatsoever, and even the rare thoughts that pop up face oddish resistance from "old-timers".
The second "must have" is a working mechanism of improving IRC. Servers don't implement new features because clients don't support them and vice versa, we're in a closed loop. It's not a big problem that servers flood clients with /list whereas they only requested a few lines - the big one is that there's no clear path for any design issue to get fixed.
