I used XMPP with facebook chat. It didn't support even a quarter of the cookiejar of features. This was with Pidgin, afaik the only serious rich crossplatform manyprotocol chat program.

So forgive me for being a little underwhelmed on the protocol itself.

It is also by design the most common denominator, with extensions infrequently supported (read: less useful). The most common denominator is of course chat and user accounts.

But chat is not the atomic networked message that we're talking about. VOIP over base64 also seems kind of like banging your head into the wall.

It feels pretty good though, because it means state of the art can be improved. It gives some reason for the current state of things. We have a go-to solution, why improve?