I would be all for expanding the list server network, but unfortunately the gains to doing so are nowhere near as significant to the downsides.

Finding availability has usually been the biggest challange for coming up with new list servers. The servers don't require much in terms of performance, but they do require the ability to remain on for long periods of times.

As Link mentioned, there's a rather large difference is your comparison between the list server network, and the EFnet IRC network -- that being an issue of scale. EFnet has over 70000 users connected to it. The list server network on the other hand hasn't had more than 10 for quite a while. So while the list server network may have been designed to be a distributed network like IRC, it certainly doesn't require it. One list server could easily handle a lot more activity than what it gets now.

There is also the problem that while the list server network may have been designed to work as a distributed system, it wasn't actually implemented all that well. Problems can start to occur when there are more than two list servers in the network. We discovered this when contrabandent, nimrod-online, and madskills were all online. Also, JJ2's handling of multiple servers doesn't work too well when one is down. And we're also familiar with the annoyances of list server patches whenever the list of list servers changes.

I agree with the point about projects being open source being possibly quicker to develop and bug fix. I would like it if Nebula allowed more people to work on his clone of the list server, but instead he hasn't worked on it much more even by himself, and so we've had to discontinue use of his server.

I'm afraid I fail to see what point you are trying to make with your comparison of the list server network and #jj2.

I think you're right that IRC networks are better than the list server network, but I'm afraid we don't have as many options to improve the list server network.