The client might be a legitimate issue, but being an information black-hole is no different than IRC. If you wanted a history, you should have made your client or a bot log that history.
If IRC was as simple and elegant and extensible as some would suggest, there wouldn't be a posse of persistent chat companies worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
IRC is simple enough for developers of and those using open source projects. Slack and their ilk have more of a place handling internal communications where non-technical people need to be involved.
