I recently (last night) started using Konversation for IRC instead of Kopete and as the title says, it's miles above its main Kompetition (sorry - couldn't resist).

The biggest problem with using Kopete for IRC is that it's mainly an IM program. There's probably only one bug that dramatically makes the difference, but it's a big one. When chatting with people over IM (one-on-one) it's much nicer to have their name and picture beside each IM. Doing that over IRC is hideous.

Of course, Konversation has support for other things I've been missing in Kopete; namely the ability to highlight messages based on arbitrary things (other than my nick) - like my name. And it's generally just much more IRC-y than Kopete.

Of course, Konversation does have its own bugs, but they can be dealt with much better than not being able to read my IRC session.