> I don't care whether XMPP is good or not, but please realize your arguments are entirely subjective

Yes and no. I mean you can argue it's a matter of taste but I don't think anyone genuinely likes (for example) having to right click and go through two levels of menu, type a name, press a button, wait for results, and double-click on the correct one, just to rejoin the groupchat they were already in, every time they lose and regain connection. The line between legitimate differences in preferences and genuinely bad design is always fuzzy, but I do think there's such a thing as objectively bad UX, and every XMPP client I ever saw had it.

> Prosody and ejabberd exist. They don't take much hacking to make them very usable - certainly quicker than writing a protocol from scratch.

I can't speak to the servers. Just to the clients.

I've never seen that happen and I used to be a fan even while it was 'Jabber' (and I still have a 'Programming Jabber' book on my shelf here, in the same section as 'Mono: A developer's notebook': For things I deeply cared about, but which lost a lot of influence over me in recent times)

That was my experience using Kopete (which was the best client I found for 1:1 chats, but the groupchat experience really sucked). In theory there was a bookmark/history feature where you could just right click and go through two levels of menu to get back to the groupchat you were just in, but it never seemed to work.

I think this comes from people attempting to roll their own low-level XMPP clients top of generic XML libraries, which is a recipe for having a bad time.

Also, people who connect Pidgin to their Gmail and think that is the pinnacle of XMPP experience, but in fact both are severely outdated.