All I can say about the whole Freenode thing is that back in the actual IRC days, this would have been a persistent DoSS and the entire server collection would shutter and every channel that cared about having IRC availability would have found a new home. See: DALnet.
And the takehome message here is that clearly the nature of "what people apparently want out of IRC" is only barely compatible with "how IRC actually works". If you don't like the network owner, you unlink your server and join a different network. Or become your own.
