I didn't say you should; rather, my point is that the problems with IRC mostly happen at the client level rather than the protocol level. Of course, it is also hard to ensure that a dominant client vendor does not start trying to add backwards-incompatible changes to the protocol. This has already happened once, and it's why the character U+0001 is now responsible for /me.

I think ideally such a client could be implemented as a plugin to an extensible terminal emulator, which might help to keep the project small and prevent Jabberification.