We just ran our own company server, which got rid of the mod abuse and netsplit problems completely. Every client we used had logs so scrollback wasn't an issue, though a few people used bouncers for the scrollback feature if they didn't like to look at logs - but having a plaintext log was invaluable to simply grep for old conversations, instead of having to use a slow painful UI to search.

I'd go back to IRC in a heartbeat. The one thing I'd miss is inline image viewing but I could survive without that!