It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.

Back when apps dared to have fun icons. I still smile when I open Cyberduck because of the hilarious icon (which is extremely well designed).

Same code in the background. Kopete for KDE could use Adium chat themes and emoticons.