[Zev]

IRC is easy. Its a basic text protocol that requires a socket and some minimal parsing to work with. Whenever I use XMPP, its never that simple. The protocol is too verbose for its own good imho.

[jackolas]

Xmpp allows you to be a bit more secure and fine tune the usage. If your client or library doesn't actually make this simpler, something has failed.

[arosien]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle.

[Zev]

Of course! All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection!

More seriously, are you saying that SSL/TLS and SASL are both insecure?