Point taken, and yet mIRC is still the most widely used and liked IRC client. If it was that far behind the times, people would not still be using it so much. There are other clients with these types of features (you can use Trillian for most of them if you wanted, for one example). Yet, people prefer mIRC. That is pretty good support for showing that mIRC is better than all these other clients that add in all this eye candy instead of useful features, don't you think?
As far as updates, very few companies are going to guarantee you many new versions each year.
