Historically, the OSS desktop has been steadily improving in usability, accessibility, and general slickness, yet the world of IRC clients has not kept up. With IRC being one of the fundamental methods of communication within the open source community, it is bizzare that this area has been neglected.
GNOME's philosophy in terms of user interfaces has been progressing towards presenting the user with few options, yet sane defaults. While many of the normal X-Chat options will be preserved inside GConf, only the most common settings will be included in the main user interface. The GTK+ frontend provides excessive customizability, with options scattered throughout the interface. This leads to an inconsistent user experience, confusion, and general clutter.
One thing to note is that this project is still extremely young. As such, at the moment is is not extremely trivial to build, run or debug. If anyone is interested in helping out, stop by #xchat-gnome on irc.freenode.net
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