You can also leave those chats you're not interested in with the touch of a button, or mute the chat if you care about the people but don't care about the chat itself. Heck, you can set it with a filter, as I said, so that it pops up if something you are interested in gets discussed. I don't quite understand your mindset about the need for subchannels on a centralized IM client. Why not just have two group chats, one named "Perl" and the other named "ECMAScript/JavaScript"? Or, since as you pointed out it's similar to a forum structure, why not just use a forum?

Also, user-reliant privacy is stronger, to me, than computer-reliant privacy. Educating users, showing them and letting them see why they should have good security practices, etc., seems like a better deal in the long run than trying to keep track of accounts and outwit the next person to exploit some weakness in the code.

But I think your one comment sums everything up: "Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me." Modern IRC, for me, is just, well, IRC. I have Miranda-NG on my computer because ChatZilla's not that good anymore. I don't need it centralized, because that's not how it works. As I said, the most bearable Discord ever was for me, was when I ran it through Miranda alongside my logins to FreeNode, EFNet, and Undernet. And even that only lasted a week before I got too frustrated with the annoyances.