I think the best approach to the issue of IRC not being federated is to create a separate protocol that can not only do that, but also learn from the mistakes o

I think the best approach to the issue of IRC not being federated is to create a separate protocol that can not only do that, but also learn from the mistakes of IRC. By design IRC is not very extensible, and because of the initial limitations of the protocol and the divided opinions on what IRC should be, we have each software vendor proposing different standards and clients that have to support all of these differences. While IRCv3 is making efforts to standardise everything, there are still very large networks that will never switch from the old-style IRC and we still have that backwards-compatibility kludge in our way when we try to build modern clients. Creating a new, modern protocol from scratch hopefully allows us not to repeat these issues and have some foresight about extensibility, elegance, and standardisation. And before anyone proposes Matrix to fill in that blank, I do not believe that it is at all suitable for the goals it is trying to accomplish.