Don't let knowledge of old * nix tools be effectively gatekeeping people from joining a FOSS project.

grep is not a sufficient replacement for indexed search with fields. Just try to use Discord's search feature, you can specify constraints extremely easily. The equivalent in grep (if you even have logs going back that far) would be some gnarly regex that you have to reference what characters you need to specify unless you're very familiar with regex.

IRC isn't hard, but it has real shortcoming and real problems. The user experience hasn't meaningfully changed in 20+ years, but people's expectations and how they interact with chat platforms has. This is coming from someone who uses IRC every day, both at work and at home.

What we really need is most of the features of Slack without it's terrible threading mechanism and no GIFs.

Well, my experience with Slack (never tried discord really) is that it's pretty hard to find anything that is more than a week old. Slack (and IRC) is designed to exchange the information quickly and forget about it. If we need traceability then e-mail is much superior to both.

Discord's search feature is beautifully from what I've experienced. I can search and get snippets from months and months ago almost instantly.

Good search can be done with chat, it just tends to be hard.