>From 7.2: Recommends "declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency." "The Recommends field should list packages that would be found
together with this one in all but unusual installations."
X-chat is often used on systems which do not have Gnome installed; it is far from unusual that a person would be using KDE or any other window manager/desktop environment, not having the Gnome system installed, and would also use X-chat. If there were a technical reason why this dependency were necessary, it would be a "Depends". There is no reason for it to have this be stronger than a "Suggests", if that.
