The fact that this particular site (hackernews) is so popular amongst tech people, without any advertising and with a really basic interface (that people love)

The fact that this particular site (hackernews) is so popular amongst tech people, without any advertising and with a really basic interface (that people love) is proof that IRC will be very much alive for a lot of years! And that definitely is in line with my experience; for every rather large community there's an IRC channel with great people ready to help. The technical problems you mention are really non existent with a web client. So it's up to us, the people to say no to proprietary platforms and use it.