I don't understand the drive people have to use a means of communication that goes directly through an 'evil' companies servers for violation checking, logging, and similar. It isn't even encrypted unless you enable 3rd party encryption programs that will only ever work with other 3rd party encryption programs. Hell, not even gaim encryption is compatible with trillian encryption.

So, what's the point? Why not go to IRC, SILC, or some protocol that runs through a server you can trust?