Why is pidgin "too out of date"? I use that on my systems and it works perfectly with Yahoo/MSN & XMPP.
I don't know why it "core dumps" when you build it manually, perhaps an inconsistent environment.. or RAM problems, but it builds fine here.
The only problem I have with pidgin is the chat log viewer, if you search for anything it does produce a core dump.
Pidgin is pretty much your only option, unless you use the KDE kopete client,
x11/kde4/network