I noticed that Kopete has great powers in customizing users. I find this very important: two things keep people attended: FEATURES and CUSTOMIZEABILITY. Thats what Miranda made so great on Windows, or Winamp, or whatever.
GROUPS
However, I propose two things for group settings:
first: Show Offline Users per Group, not just globally.
Some users are even important if they're offline. Groups make really not very much sense without this option.
second: Allow sort of Group manually, not just alphabetical. This one is really annoying.
Implementation of this two things should be really easy.
PROTOCOLS
first: Make a null protocol part of standard.
second: reintegrate winpopup please. It was a working feature, why take it out? I am not able to compile CVS somehow, and no binary contains winpopup. Why take out somethink which is working?
third: concentrate some more on the ICQ/Oscar Protocol. Do you really want to switch people to MSN all the time? In german countries ICQ always was the biggest - because it was the first IM. File transfer really should be a goal, I know it isnt. This is skiddish. we have licq, miranda and many other open source clients, which implemented ICQ in a good way. it is not a secret how to do this.
I see a lot of potential in Kopete. But if (IF, I dont hope so) the designers intend to say: No we wont concentrate on this little things, or implement more protocols but only half the way to work, gaim will keep #1, licq #2 and I even prefer miranda over wine. there was a cool licq clone which looked promising once, sim. but instead of implementing the existing protocols working, they began to develop more and more protocols, all half-working, plugins unneeded, and so on. this is sad thing though.
I really like kopete because of little features, like giving users own icons, clean design and much room to read and write messages (not bloated with stuff).