Nigh all of the protocols have incomplete support.

I purely use it as a chat client and avoid most of the more complicated features, since I don't use them.

Yeah, that's why I asked, because if you use only 1 chat protocol, a dedicated client is almost always better (now that ICQ and AIM are dead). Pidgin really shines if you need to aggregate multiple protocols in a single client.

> now that ICQ and AIM are dead

ICQ is alive and well, and has native clients for most modern OSes.

https://icq.com/

It got bought out and spun off when AOL were shutting down.

Indeed, and that is why I use it.

I certainly have no wish to have five different clients open, many of which not even scriptable when I can have all my contacts in one list.

That's been my experience with developing with libpurple unfortunately. The APIs are very inflexible for advanced chat features, and theres little documentation for making your own plugin.