Okay, this will take way too many Tweets for me to write out properly, so I'll type it out here really quickly.
"IRC," like most other words, is both denotative and connotative. Internet Relay Chat, strictly speaking, is just a protocol, but it comes loaded with an expected methodology and culture.
Ideally, we should take advantage of the former to fix some of the problems with the latter.
##IRC is Modular
The crux of this is that IRC is modular in the sense that, as a protocol, it only requires a compliant client and server. Beyond that, there is no way that it has to be. We can layer client features, server features, and other features like bots on top of it.