IRC has never been very usable, and some combination of its userbase or its very nature resists all efforts to make it more usable. You can't get history in any kind of standardised way (the workaround, such as it is, is to run a bouncer program somewhere you have a unix shell account and hope that host stays up), the multi-client experience is dreadful, rich-text support is barely there and forget about links, embedded images, or file uploads, authentication is not at all standardised and differs a lot from server to server.