[potatolicious]

Incredibly hacky and fragile - the MSN Messenger protocol of yesteryear was similar. It was originally a plaintext-only protocol that was simple to implement, but many features were grafted on top over the years while trying to maintain backwards compatibility.

By the time that protocol mercifully died the thought of implementing a client would rightly give programmers nightmares.

The argument I see in this thread (not yours necessarily) seems to suggest that in order to implement modern features demanded by users we ought to favor grafting plugins and protocol extensions on top of IRC rather than use something that actually supports said features out of the box.