We have to use it at work, and unfortunately the gateway was not enabled for us. In general slack just sucks so much more than IRC that it is almost unbearable. Searching the logs is one of the worst tasks ever. The easy accessibility is their pro and marketing guys will fall for it. Consent among develops is that it just sucks. It is really bad that they close the gateways because the lucky few that could use slack via an IRC client will really grieve. mosh/tmux/weechat beats the crappy client on flaky connections anytime. If the mobile client was as good as WhatsApp or telegram I would not dare to complain. But the mobile client lags and shows messages multiple times.

Horrible I tell you Great disaster No longer necessary Catastrophic mistake

Why does it sick more than irc to an almost unbearable degree?

They don’t really want your feedback. They’ve already decided - and generating feedback from people who haven’t recently/ever logged in to the gateways will only cause them to ignore feedback in general.

Please, Slack, kill the gateway and unleash the exodus to open, federated platforms like Matrix.

Why would they want feedback AFTER announcing they would drop support, (and using a pastebin service to spread the "news"?)..that sounds counterintuitive to me.

They presumably sent OP the email because he has used it. Most won’t receive it.