Comment by btown

To be fair, I'd imagine that the majority of this money and effort is spent on highly secure and fault-tolerant transport protocols, and IRC is just a layer on top of those. So it's likely not being totally wasted.

And even the comm protocols designed to replace the IRL level? Think of those from an agile-development perspective; if they don't build it to test their assumptions in the real world, then they could be making an inefficient product. And in this business, an inefficient product can mean lives lost.