Really, having a $10 VPS and using screen or tmux is "uber-geek"? Look, if you can code in virtually any programming language I'd like to think you have the ability to use screen and irssi in under 10 minutes. We are talking specifically about open source projects, not general IM across a business (though I'd still use IRC there, just give everyone hexchat/xchat/whatever nice GUI client you want).

For end-user support people are still more than capable of using a desktop IRC client, as evidenced by the WEALTH of people that ask questions on #fedora, #debian, #ubuntu, etc every single day.

We're talking about chats for open source programming projects, not the local book club. In that context, setting up an IRC bouncer or running a command line client in tmux on a VPS is not really a high bar.