They do maintain the simplicity of the line oriented protocol, so I’m fine with that. :)

That’s the strongest point of IRC, IMO, and why it’s kept so simple : every instruction is a line, period. It makes it incredibly simple to build on top of it. You don’t need to introduce a dependency to a project that probably will be abandonned in a few years, at which point you’ll have to rewrite your codebase to use an other dependency, for a few years. You just open a TCP connection, you read lines from the socket and write lines to it, each line is its own instruction structured in well known fields, and that’s it. It’s so simple!

As long as IRCv3 sticks to that, they have my blessing. :)