One way to fix that would be to list a set of features that hipchats, et al. have that are desirable, and then think of the way to gracefully degrade them to plain-text format.

After that, it's just a matter of implementing few plugins for popular IRC clients that would improve the UI of their respective clients to support those new features.

If anyone is going to start such endeavour, I'm willing to put some man-hours (starting next month) into writing plugins for ERC and Weechat.el, and maybe help with others.