Yeah, unfortunately that plugin was a bit of a bodge… you’d have to rearchitect a fair bit to do chat properly in Discourse, and we have now done that.
No question that we need fast-lane (chat) and slow-lane (topic) support side-by-side. It’s my fault that we didn’t do it sooner, but rest assured, this will be an entirely different level of super shiny polish with full integration, not the super-hacky bodge that was the old third party chat plugin.