I'm of the pinnacle of chat crowd, and I will fully acknowledge the difficulty to someone that is not on the technical side. However, popularity does not determine quality. From a programmer (bot/client) creator, its perfect. The protocol is simple, light, and fast. For basic usage there is no confusing things, and even where I've had confusion (DCC), it turned out to be simple. From the view of just a user, I still prefer IRC. The clients are lightweight, my Hexchat client is taking up 28mb of ram right now, and its one of bulkier ones. The lack of images allows compactness and simplicity.