Yeah, Pidgin has fallen behind significantly with regards to modern XMPP compliance. The developers are still working on Pidgin actively, but the focus is on a big rewrite of the foundations right now (3.0) so they can more easily support modern IM features.
I wish them luck, but considering their lack of manpower, by the time 3.0 comes out for "modern IM features", we'll probably have telepathic computers.
I was there when they had the famous video-voice branch.
