I'm sorry you had that experience; for the record, Pidgin is not representative of the XMPP protocol (Pidgin is outdated, broken, and the XMPP side of it is mostly unmaintained). If you're one of those people who likes lots of switches and knobs and everything under the sun supported I'd recommend Gajim (personally, I don't think it's stable enough for day-to-day use, but others I know just like having all the bells and whistles it provides), if you want a bit more stability, I'd try Swift, if you want a CLI I'd try Mcabber (Possibly with the Vi-mode keyboard binding patches that are floating about on GitHub somewhere)