You're confusing "colorspace" with "palette". Windows has supported 16BIT and 32BIT colorspaces for a long time (ie. even Windows 95), but the standard system *palette* uses a small set of those colours. mIRC has the ability to render any colour, the only difference is you can only use 16 of them at a time in the text display.
It's one thing to say "you would use this" if it were available, it's another thing to say "you need this". As I said before in other threads regarding this topic, supporting more colours would be great. Calling the current system "awkward" is simply false, though.
In any case, the point of my original response was to point out that this has been suggested before, and the discussion has basically been hashed out to completion. Khaled knows about this, so be patient and let him decide whether to implement it.
