In defense of my
IRC client of choice...
First of all, the stuff dtaylor mentions could be outside some people's range of tolerance. You can turn it off, though. To get rid of the kick/quit messages, just do the following at your Unix prompt:
locate BitchX.quit
locate BitchX.reasons
...and delete the files! If you don't have access to them, ask your sysadmin to do it. Failing that, just take the time to type your own kick or quit message. Note that if you delete or otherwise compromise the files, the default quit message will be "BitchX-%v -- just do it." (where %v is your BitchX version). You can set the default kick message (in the absence of the BitchX.reasons file) by doing "/set default_reason blah blah"
As for the auto-away and kick protection, these are not locked-on features either. In BX 1.0 or higher, type "/tog" to display a list of all toggles, which includes auto_away, kick_protection, and other things you might want to turn off. To turn these on or off, type "/tog" again, this time followed by the symbol whose value you want to toggle. Easy, huh?
If you want to get rid of the high ASCII characters prefixing server messages, you can do "/set show_numerics_str ***", and replace the *** with whatever you'd prefer. If you'd like to turn off ALL high ASCII, you'll need to recompile your BX with #define ONLY_STD_CHARS in config.h.
And lastly, one random hint that I've discovered. To add a topic ticker at the top of the window, do "/wset status_format3 %- " (include the trailing space at the end, or else you'll encounter a bug that will repeat the last character in the topic ad infinitum), and then do "/window split on".
BitchX is a very good client, if you're running it locally without lag, and you know how to turn off the annoying features. It also happens to have the fastest DCC rates of any IRC client I've ever used. Before you bash it, go through the /tog and /set lists and see if you can't maybe off that which would cause you to complain.