I can't say I was totally thrilled with adium either. But you do know you can download emoticon, skins etc (they have a whole slew of them, like firefox has extensions). It depends on what you want, the only real prob I had with adium (and this depends on whether it matters to you. But when in rome....) is that whatever emoticons you have, you only see them unless the other person downloads those emoticons also. Otherwise they only see the keystrokes you've used or their own equivalents. This all might be changed in later versions as so far I think it's kept up pretty well.. It's much more stable then msn, and has better transfer abilities (some aren't better tho).
The other problem is that it auto names your account if you have more than one. It did ok on the non-admin one but the admin one it automatically names it and it won't give me a choice to change it.
If you still don't like it, you can search on this forum as there have been quite a few posts about adium and other free alternatives (amsn is one I think, but it's only for msn and you can't get icq, aol or others on it I don't think--but you can do webcam on it)... You can also search keywords "free, chat, mac" on here or google. Recently I also found there is an extension or plugin for firefox which allows all chat clients (but I haven't tried it yet--I found that at about.com under firefox along with games and a lot of other options)..
Good luck with that