Yeah, so...
This was made entirely for my own personal use and as such you may find it not quite like other clients; it's not meant to be.
That said, I will explain the design decisions I made that you have pointed out.
I find the difference between server and client commands an important distinction, almost no other irc client writers do.
JOIN, PART, and QUIT are server commands, as such they are sent literally to the server and the client does no interpretation whatsoever on them.
exit is /not/ quit, it does not replace quit at all. exit is used because it sends a quit to EVERY server you are connected to then exits the program, a server-command quit goes just to the active server (and will indeed drop this connection, if reconnect is false). This is done so that you can be connected to multiple servers and connect/disconnect independently for each.
I will however always take input in order to make more people happy so long as it doesn't compromise my design principles. I plan to do some significant refactoring then release version 0.4 in the next few months (no definite schedule though).
I can add a client-command /quit with the behavior of /exit; due to the escape being different I don't think it'll be ambiguous whether it's going to the client or server. I see no reason that /join and /part need to be client-side commands at all, and the addition of them would really be pretty useless, since they would have exactly the same behavior as :join and
art now.
I also plan to make time formats configurable; I realize not everyone reads UNIX time...