IRC is a more "skilled" level of chat
This is misleading. You don't need any "skills" to use IRC casually.
The *real* difference between "IM" and IRC is that IM, in general, has little support for group conversations. If they do, they tend to lack the most basic support for channel/room administration that makes it feasible to control large groups of people. IM is designed for 1-to-1 conversation. IRC is designed for a 1-to-many conversation. This makes IRC superior for one form of conversation and IM superior for another. The technical knowledge common among IRC users is more likely a side effect of the open (source) implementations of clients/servers, scriptability of clients/servers, as well as a number of other issues (distributed vs. centralized, free vs. ad supported)-- it is not the other way around. There are many non-technical users on IRC, some without even knowing it (through gateways like
www.webmaster.com and other Java/JS based chat applets). You're confusing correlation and causation here. Skilled users gravitate towards IRC, but IRC in itself requires little skill, certainly with the clients available today.
Emoticons are rather irrelevant to both from a protocol design perspective, which is why you can have clients that support emoticons and those that don't. mIRC could theoretically support emoticons, if Khaled had the time and enough will from the userbase to make it happen.
But let's get technical: mIRC has a very specific implementation that makes it relatively difficult to implement emoticons without changing a lot of core features in the client. This is likely the most important reason it won't happen any time soon. There are existing scripts/dlls which make use of neat hacks to get this working on the client side (converting
to a smiley, for instance). So in essence, the functionality already exists, though it is not in mIRC's core code.
As mentioned, there are clients that support emoticons. None of them have been game changers. None of them have inspired people to IRC. So really, the data on how much emoticon support impacts your client is already out there. You can do a more empirical study if you'd like, but from my anecdotal experience it really has no impact on IRC usage or adoption at all. It's simply a gimmick that existing IRC users shrug off and new IRC users might find "cute". I mean, even users of MSN or AIM don't use IM because they can have emoticons. They don't even choose between competing IM protocols based on emoticon support. They use IM because the form of communication serves their needs and a less rational regional critical mass effect. By the same token, a user will not choose IM over IRC because one has a better looking smiley face, they'll choose IM over IRC because their friends IM but don't IRC. It's pretty much as simple as that.
Finally, to call mIRC outdated because it's "text-based" is a little ironic. The whole point of IRC is that it's text-based. I always find this argument for emoticons a little funny. Firstly because it assumes text-based communication is "outdated" (texting is outdated now? the barely 3 year old twitter is outdated? news to me), secondly because you fail to see that mIRC is not the reason it's text based-- the IRC protocol is. Again, you could convert smilies into cute little pictures, but that really doesn't change the core concept of IRC being a text-based chat protocol.
