It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.
* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.
* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages
* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on
* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
And bear in mind KDE3 was considered the bloated DE, as XFCE (even the GTK2 build) could snappily run with 64 MB of RAM and maybe less with a light GTK engine (yes, choosing the GTK2 engine mattered a lot back in the day).
And, yes, choosing Pidgin and a light window manager such as Fluxbox/Openbox could make run machine run well with 64MB at really fast speeds.
Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.
