I don't use YIM or AIM and I don't use Firestorm. Phoenix and Firestorm, IMHO, are too green around the gills for me and I don't like some of the things they do. But the sad thing is, if you look at what you just said, it amounts to: Second Life is doing a lot of monkey see monkey do now instead of innovating.
I guess I like the way they innovated instead of the way they followed blindly.
And I understand that when I log off, my chat history is gone, and when I log on again it will start over again. The same as it was for IM's in the past (V1). The IM's tabbed in the “Communicate” window, again IMHO, worked extremely well. It made it so you could “Communicate” easily. But then it could just be me liking how it worked in the past and now stuck on TPV's. But hey, I NEVER expected to see the sidebar disappear, maybe “Communicate” will come back too. With a few tweaks, the landscape of V3 is looking more like V1 than V2, could be there is hope yet.