[Edi]

From a user interface perspective, a separate program is in some ways actually better because it won't be taking up screen real estate from the game UI. Which would be kind of a big thing here unless the text chat was put in the same space as the kingdom overview and those two were swappable. Which would still be an almighty pain in the arse. Otherwise it would have to be a slidedown or something else that you can get out of the way.

There are tradeoffs with any solution you can think of here. We'll see what Illwinter does, since the issue has been taken up with them.