I think if most people saw the limitations of irc as the author then it would still be the dominant protocol
And it doesn't seem to me that "fixing" irc is just a matter of adding the bells and whistles, but there's some work to be done on the lower levels as well
For example, how well would irc work on mobile? Keeping logs requires a bot usually on irc as well.
For mobile, I had a bouncer setup that would keep me up to date whenever someone would message or mention me. I could pull up AndChat and connect right up to all of my channels, I was never actually offline. I had an icon on my taskbar that would connect me to my VPN and pull up irssi. I see now that there is a cloud client for mobile called "IRC Cloud", it sounds like a one step setup kind of bouncer for someone that doesn't have an always online machine to run a bouncer on.
I really do miss using IRC all the time. My favorite server got taken down and I never bothered to find out where everyone ran off to.
And it doesn't seem to me that "fixing" irc is just a matter of adding the bells and whistles, but there's some work to be done on the lower levels as well
For example, how well would irc work on mobile? Keeping logs requires a bot usually on irc as well.