To me, the takeaway of these posts is that mIRC should enable "Cancel away on activity" by default..
I think the reason this was disabled by default is privacy - a user may want to appear as away eg. if they are talking privately with someone else or working on a script on a private channel, and so on.
One possible solution could be: if you message someone while they are away and they reply, mIRC could temporarily hide subsequent away messages eg. for the next five/ten minutes.
