The article has the basic underlying (though not explicitly written down) assumption, that an AP IRC network (like the classical IRC) is strictly superior to a

The article has the basic underlying (though not explicitly written down) assumption, that an AP IRC network (like the classical IRC) is strictly superior to a CP IRC network (like RobustIRC). But that's not a universal fact, but merely a matter of opinion. And no one claims, that RobustIRC is AP. It will survive most netsplits without real problems, but of course, if the network splits such that you as a user can't reach any of the serves in the majority partition, you can't participate. But a) this isn't very probable, unless b) you can reach no server at all (in which case, obviously, regular IRC also fails). You might even claim, that the fact that RobustIRC includes the user as a part of the "network" (by not relying on a single identifying TCP connection, but instead offering carrying over a session to a different server) it handles most netsplits better then traditional IRC (because it has less user impact). tl;dr: RobustIRC makes the conscious choice to sacrifice some availability for consistency. But even then, it can still be available through most netsplits.