I agree with the IRC issue.

IRC is not a mode of communication I favour.

Then you're going to miss out on real time discussions, there's nothing anyone can do about that. Sure, we could stop using IRC, but what's the point? It would just mean that every decision gets made unilaterally until someone complains, rather than the current system of running things by people that happen to be on IRC at the time you decide a decision needs make and then putting it on meta to give other people a chance to disagree.