You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.
Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.
Like @devtoi@feddit.nu I use plain-text accounting (PTA) to manage a few bank accounts, including small businesses. In my case, I’m using hledger. Every time I get a receipt, invoice, or statement, I type it into a text file. My bank gives me CSVs which are easy to import. Reports are done with a few commands; repeatable reports are done by saving commands to a shell script. hledger comes with builtin tools for monthly reports, BSE, currencies, pending invoices, closing/opening new years, and those are merely what I recall using recently.