We are planning to bring some experimental JSON-based transport for 3.3 which will allow us to eventually start transitioning to considering IRC events in an intermediate representation. The key thing is going to be getting the client authors to understand the benefits of this approach, as well as providing implementation of both the extended RFC1459 payload format and the JSON format.
The eventual end game is to have a flag day and deprecate the legacy format, but this will probably take a few years to do.
https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/55 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/57