As an anecdotal counter-point, I love threads in a live chat. When used correctly, it means when my idiot friends start having a heated discussion about some random topic while I'm at work, I get one 'ding' from my phone and then never again until I start interacting or they @ me. As opposed to the 427 new notifications I get on my phone about whether Golden Eye was better than Mario Kart 64.

Ultimately the tech is only as good as the humans that use it. If you're chatting with folks that can't understand the difference between a thread or not, that's a meat-bag issue and not anything an RFC can fix.