Dude you got wellllllllll to philisophical . I think his comment was more humour based than an intended shinning beacon of wisdom . <| sep |> I love you <| sep |> I ' ve not fallen into this trend . because I hate games like this , if anything its stereotyped video gaming today in general . nowadays if you play video games , most people will assume you play Call of Duty and other FPS games . It kind of irritates me . <| sep |> The protocol is absolutely not irrelevant . It ' s limiting . You have multiple interfaces including many homebrew ones running through it , so the command line is pretty much stuck there . Changing the protocol or syntax breaks many interfaces instantly . And any new features have to route through the antiquated command line . It ' s cumbersome , inelegant , and inflexible . The interface is horrible all of them , but especially blitzin is horrible , but that ' s just a matter of taste . If you like it , great . Most people don ' t . Clearly . ICC ' s features are not far better . Searching for games between two super grandmasters is not something many users have trouble doing , and anyone willing to look up the awful syntax to do it on ICC would have far less trouble doing it in many other places , such as 365 or chessbase ' s online database . This is nothing special . Lichess has lots of stuff ICC doesn ' t have . Just go through the menus and pretty much everything there , ICC doesn ' t have . As far as the players you actually care about , those are the players most people don ' t care much about . Most people want to play , and most are not going to be playing masters because they aren ' t masters . Sure , for the top 510 % of players , you ' d want lots of masters , but guess what the other 9095 % of players don ' t need ? The video library at chess . com is great , too . ICC ' s is hardly unique . I personally prefer chesslecture . com for videos to either chess . com or ICC , but whatever . As for that last bit , you are again only talking about the top . 1 % of players would want to play . That ' s not relevant .