Comment 9 for bug 256478

What Tom and Phil said...
A little more than a year ago Ubuntu made the bold choice of replacing Pidgin, which I'll concede, is a stagnant and no-longer innovating project, but that is nevertheless pretty much "up there" feature AND stability-wise (except for video and some other "extras" that it's been clear all along that will probably never get added) with Empathy, which is a cool new (well not so much anymore) project with an interesting completely modular design and a much greater room for improvement in the grand scheme of the always-online desktop, in the hopes that doing so would inject empathy with the neccesary developers and innovating drive required to make it a top-of-the-line IM solution perfectly suited for Ubuntu. Now, one year later, Ubuntu has done a GREAT job in the workflow of the DE in general but has done almost nothing for Empathy (except for the webcam thing which doesn't really work that well either). Today, empathy feels almost as primitive, aphla-y, unstable and generally unusable as it did a year ago. Simple things like this bug's metacontacts, the control over chat logs or even the keyboard shortcut for switching between tabs (Ctrl-tab) are sorely missing. And the responses we get from gnome developers range from a simple "no, and we'll never add that kind of control" (in the case of the keyboard shortcut, to an elusive "it's planned for Gnome 3" which is (IMHO) inacceptable not only for the fact that Gnome 3 is in all probability more than a year away (and even more so before it can be considered "production stable"), but also because it denotes the unflexible and disregarding nature of the people in charge of this project.
I just think the folks at Ubuntu should have given that decision a little more thought, specially given the controversy and uproar that it caused when it was proposed.
And I wish someone could hack-in this functionality, because small and insignificant as it may be, makes a day-and-night difference for people with >3 IM accounts.