Linux needs better IM clients!

There are several IM clients for Linux and they work perfectly fine for the most basic operations, like chatting and file transfer. I personally like Gaim. It's fast, stable and the simplicity of its interface is great. I've also tried aMsn, Kopete, Mercury with different degrees of success. But looking at their Window's counterparts (msn messenger, yahoo, icq, etc) they seem a lot behind. Modern IMs now have things like animated smileys, custom and animated backgrounds, small flash animations and most importantly web cam and audio support.
Well, some Linux IMs actually have most of those features, being aMsn probably the most complete and Gaim the least (doesn't have any of those features). My experience with aMsn (and others) is not very successful. aMsn seemed very unstable, and although I could get my webcam to work, it was too sluggish to be of any use. Mercury seemed promising but I couldn't get the web cam to work. And audio definitely didn't work with neither. I know some have had success with these programs, but they definitely need much work to be able to compete with windows IMs.

Many Linux users don't care about these features, but they are important. And if we want Desktop Linux to be successful they're essential, like it or not. Audio and video is the most important. And is not only to keep up with your friends. Many companies use this for internal video-conferencing (it's simpler, cheaper and perfectly suffices in many cases).
But custom backgrounds, flash animations, etc are also important. And I know many people dislike these features and don't understand why it matters. For several years I lived without those flash animations and fancy backgrounds, but now I'm rebooting to others OSes to use them. Before you think I got some sort of mental illness, let me give you a simple compelling reason why it matters: when you want to talk to a girl (non-techie) that happens to like those features, the whole argument "I use Gaim because I have Linux and it's open source and it's better..." just doesn't seem that strong all of a sudden. And you'll end up using (or letting her use) those features. It's just an example :) but it shows that there are people that want to use those features.

The point is: in many aspects Linux is leading the innovation (take XGL for example), but IM is several years behind. I know it's a very difficult subject because most of the communication protocols are not public. But I'm not sure this lack of good and innovating IMs has all to do with hidden protocols. I just think there's not enough motivation in Linux programmers for implementing it. Maybe distros like Redhat, Suse or Ubuntu start seeing this and start promoting more advances in this area.