Don't want to beat a dead thread here, but I only just noticed this response.
What Jarkko Oikarinen did and what tidy_trax is proposing are two entirely different things. Jarkko, as you pointed out, made something new. tidy_trax is talking about taking something old (and in some places not so old seeing as the protocol is so fractured) and trying to make it into something new - the same supposed protocol but incompatible with the existing implementations.
There needn't be another decade before 'a new house' comes along. In fact I'm quite certain it would be much faster and in many ways easier to create a new protocol than try and pull all of the peices of the current one into a single whole again - and without the limitations of what that 'fixed' protocol could be. I certainly don't want to limit people's creativity, quite the opposite, I propose that instead of thinking small (IMO) and trying to patch up a rather beaten and in some ways flawed protocol (albeit one that's been very good to me over the years) that people instead put their efforts into creating a new protocol which overcomes all of the shortcomings of IRC and avoids the mistakes of the past by forming some kind of working group to maintain it and prevent the division that has occurred within the IRC protocol.
