I agree with everything you are saying about Trillian.
I convinced at least two of my main contacts to switch to Trilliam from only using AIM.
I was only using AIM to talk to them. I think ICQ was much better. Mainly the Offline Messaging and Multiple Away Modes. I convinced them to switch for like four seconds from AIM to ICQ. but they hated it and they didn't have any of their contacts. I guess it depends on what you learned on though. I was spoiled. Using the first IM program when it was first starting. I still remember when someone told me about it. "Hey, there's this cool ICQ thing where you can email people, but the get it right away, and you can see when they are online and stuff. It's fun!"

Another feature of ICQ I loved was being able to appear offline to other users, I used that constently.