I'd bet that early web servers, too, did some really weird things when web adoption started to snowball in the 90's. A protocol/paradigm's current state of impl

I'd bet that early web servers, too, did some really weird things when web adoption started to snowball in the 90's. A protocol/paradigm's current state of implementation is not necessarily indicative of future progress and adoption. If anything, the fact that developers like you are building large-scale applications and discovering what breaks it is encouraging for XMPP's future.