The perfect terminal....

Question

O great sages, please bestwo unto me the perfect terminal.
After using every terminal conceived from gnome-terminal to st, i still haven't found 'the one' that I will settle down and marry.  This is due to a number of reasons, but I feel like my needs are not too outlandish.  Yet it seems that right when I've found the perfect one there is something horribly wrong lurking underneath. 
This is what I need and use daily:
dwm
irssi (alt + 1,2,3, etc ) 
finch
ssh
various other primarily-console-based programs
the ubiquitous "lightweight" feel on any application
true type fonts
This is what I'd like:
real transparency, but pseudo will (and does) suffice. 
clickable links
full clipboard support.
I know the urxvt-lovers are going to sound off on this immediately so I'll make a disclaimer:  I use urxvtd/c as my primary terminal.  Yes, I like it.  Yes, I know it has many of these features.  It does, however, lack the ability to cooperate with xcompmgr in any way, and it doesn't work with finch, which is very important to me.
So my question is this:  what terminal can I use?  What will work with finch and irssi's Alt+1,2,3 window feature (this is the most important)?  Xterm doesn't seem to support this feature, nor does it even have pseudo-transparency.  Will I ever find true transparency in dwm?  Basically, I want to dump urxvt because of the xcompmgr issue and some other things that annoy me, but I can't because of the console-tabbed browsing I've become accustomed to.  What to do?
Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

Wow I didn't expect this many responses
sand_man and XFire - I've tried those two in the past and am really not a fan of vte terminals in general.  Although I've been known to use terminator perhaps more than I should (I'm pretty anti-GNOME anything)
hbekel:  Thank you!  that works nicely.  Seems as if xterm is a front-runner for me again. 
B and mythus:  I'm not a fan of the Xfce menubar or the dependencies it pulls, but it is nice, and worth another look.
jac and nixpunk:  My arrow keys don't work properly in finch.  I've seen the help floating around about exporting TERM in .bash_profile, but I never could get it to work.  And also, isn't exporting the value $TERM bad?
tomk:  irssi works fine for me in urxvt as well, including alt+1,2, etc.
Aprz and JohannesSM64:  unfortunately this isn't the problem.  I use Mod4Key as my meta in dwm (gotta love using the Windows key for THAT!)  The problem only arises in xterm.  But hbekel fixed the issue with his XTerm*metaSendsEscape: True tip.
moljac024 and sHyLoCk: Whenever i run xcompmgr with urxvt, the terminals go blank.  I'm sure it's just a tweak in the .Xdefaults file then.  I'd like to discontinue use of urxvt if possible, though.
Now my only question is this:  Is there any way to get TRUE transparency in dwm with xterm?  I'd like to use xterm exclusively if possible becuase of the easy config in .Xdefaults and the stock-standard feel of it.  So yes, I'm weird.  But I can't be the only one with these hopes and dreams.
In Openbox, the devilspie trick works nicely on any program I wished to provide transparency via transset(-df).  In dwm, devilspie doesn't work.  Anyone have any tips and tricks?
Thank you all for your help, I appreciate it