As a long time IRC user being an oper is the uber status symbol: this is what you want. I suppose it’s not PC to tell
people to fuck off and ban them but that’s exactly how you dealt with whiners “in the day”.
It's better to just not. If you spend any amount of time running IRC networks you will soon discover that there are plenty of people who see this as a game, you're probably not up to play.
I’ll give you a hint: I have been on IRC for 29 years.
I'm sure your long experience with IRC would be quite interesting to HN readers but for that you need to share information, not get into spats.