Having watched a coworker spend a solid week getting our company's ircd setup (and this was our VP of Engineering, mind you), I've gotta call BS here. Also, until I started using irccloud[1] a few months ago, I was using ZNC, and that's no walk in the park either.
Was he writing custom patches for it, re-implementing SSL, custom services.
I think you wanted to tell us about how hard setting up irc could be but ended up telling us something about your VP of Engineering.
Setting up anything for IRC - be it a bouncer, a bot, an ircd - requires just one thing:
Being able to read, comprehend and some patience.
If all that fails, you just hop on IRC and ask the devs in the projects channel....
So I'd question the point of building a native client, given ZNC's shortcomings. What's so special about this client that you couldn't just run it as a web service using Node, rather than only making it available as a fat node-webkit client?
While I could have relied on the defaults, I wouldn't trust my users' data with a default configuration. It would be irresponsible at best, and this is even more important to companies.
I've gotta call BS on your story. Unless he was learning Unix from scratch, it shouldn't take more than a couple hours to setup an ircd.
When you start adding features you don't need but think are cool or may one day get used, setting up these things becomes a whole other thing. A IRC server with simple nick auth and chanserv I'm sure would've been enough. What else did your VP implement? A egg drop not? Some other features? There has to be more to this story then you've said.