Yeah, they don't 'click' but I've been successfully selecting which irc channel to join/switch to, which person to msg etc, for a long list of choices it is much better/easier to use than pulley way (or maybe my thumb is too short)

Exactly because current guidelines do not offer anything else than pulley to select a menu option where you have extra click to select for long lists, why if IRC guys introduced a cool way to interact with long lists?
(I guess swipe left for page with subreddits would be ok with guidelines and have exactly the same functionality, except silica dot to indicate that you can go right and not the highlighted side, you're not navigating inwards without selecting anything anyway)

extra edit just to end my rant: silica guidelines are ok for mobile apps with few choices, try to implement silica/pulleys for QT Creator/Transmission/GIMP, with many choices pulley just sucks or needs workaround to hide all settings under a few choices, for often used options that just doesn't work, just imagine chatting with few people on IRC at the same time having to pulley each time to select 'msg' then to select the guy, not only does the left/right pulley give you info who msged you with colour but removes all that burden (and then add chatting on few channels, SW keyboard is a pain already, but I've been using IRC normally/dektop-like on N900 and with HWKB I expect the same from Jolla) /rant