I think you have just described the normal IRC experience for any software project in existence. IRC just tend to breed cliques and inside jokes, and the most common form of reply I have ever gotten while looking for help is "check the source code". Never mind that its a few thousands line of low level C, magic numbers and possible some assembler instructions.
I found the python, ruby and perl channels very nice when I was learning the languages a decade ago or so, and by my occasional lurking they still seem to be.
Recently I was on #elm on freenode and it also was a nice place.
Cliques and inside jokes obviously are part of what a community _is_ but that doesn't necessarily translate to smugness and lack of empathy.
I have used the python django IRC channel when developing some sites, and "check the source" has been the most common answer when I run into walls. Usefully, the questions I make receives some basic "see if the documentation say something" which I had of course already done, and then after a few hours of silence, someone says "check the source". This was a 3-4 years ago so maybe it has been improved?
It is true that I don't go to an IRC channel except when documentation and extensive testing has failed to produce an answer. Maybe the smugness and lack of empathy is more a product of asking questions that are not easily answered?