While I'm definitely not a fan of UnrealIRCd or some of it's developers, I don't think the RFC argument holds much weight. Simply put, the IRC protocol is abandonware. Jarkko Oikarinen published RFC1459 in 1993 and since then every modification has been ad-hoc changes tagged on by software developers. Even the additional IRC RFCs were written by IRCd coders looking to document and legitimise their additions. All things told, the lack of standards and solid specification in IRC software can't be blamed solely on developers since if someone wrote a strictly RFC1459-compliant server it would probably be considered unuseable and featureless by many of today's IRC users.
