Ofcourse if i (or anybody else) would write a chat protocol today i would make changes. But i'm not even sure if i would abandon xml. I'm in the same boat as you and think xml is too verbose and all that other stuff but i've recently programmed some xmpp projects and i came to the conclusion that xml actually realy does work well. And i didn't even use a library like sleekxmpp because i wanted to know everything. I'll just say: good luck designing something that'll be able to grow for 20 years and still work today. You can realy feel where the X in XMPP comes from.

I have to mention the Conversations people. For me they are a big reason why i use xmpp. It's not only the client which is very good, but the stuff like http-uploads fix some very real problems in very little amount of code.

Also once axolotl-xmpp works and prosody 0.10 is released i see no reason not to use xmpp honestly, which i will regardless, even if everybody uses something else (like WhatsApp) i will simply write myself a transport server and continue to use Conversations.

While i don't use it, projects like biboumi are realy cool. With a simple combination of biboumi[1] and httpuploadcomponent[2] you now can share files in irc-rooms.

I still have more to say. I hope that once i have my perfect chat-setup i will write about it.

[1]: https://github.com/louiz/biboumi [2]: https://github.com/siacs/HttpUploadComponent