I disagree. In theory, yes it's an improvement, but it still doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect, and in practice it's much harder to understand why it produces the election results that it generates.

I think most people who study this topic would agree that approval voting is better than IRV. Many people then go on to say "but at least IRV is better than FPTP". My concern is that IRV is effectively worse than FPTP, because it may poison people's enthusiasm for alternative voting systems when they see the strange outcomes it sometimes yields.

I don't think my fear is just theoretical either, as this has already happened before when the 2009 Burlington IRV election produced a strange outcome, and they subsequently switched back to FPTP.