@wimpy True story, I submitted a project to https://nlnet.nl/ whose goal is to fix this and provide a service that I can use in @pidgin 3 and they rejected it without asking any questions.
Haven't gotten to the point of needed it yet for Pidgin 3 but that day keeps getting closer and closer.
That said I've been brainstorming with a friend who did a bunch of work on the openembed stuff in synapse, the python based matrix homeserver which as you would have guessed as a similar issue.
oblomov