This was my take as I read it too. It's definitely a great piece of engineering and I really enjoyed reading about it, but comparing it to Slack rather than jus

This was my take as I read it too. It's definitely a great piece of engineering and I really enjoyed reading about it, but comparing it to Slack rather than just IRC feels disingenuous. That said, I'd be really interested in what tools like Slack would look like if they aggressively pursued simplicity ahead of new features. Capitalism as a whole doesn't seem to encourage this kind of development, so there aren't many examples in the wild of enterprise software that is as simple as it could reasonably be. Nonetheless, it's an interesting thought experiment.