Interesting perspective. A bit elitist, but I respect the sentiment. Voice chat should be of suitable quality. If there are third party softwares that certain groups find more suited to their taste, but a voicechat integrated with gameplay would be awesome.
One paradigm that would make voice Chat conceivable is reversing who can hear by default. By default, typically, everyone can hear everyone. Change the default to, no one can hear you, and you over time add people to your personal 'chat room.'
I very much like the localised thing, and I think that should be an option as well. But there are two instances where, at the very least, I think chat would be interesting:
A) The Captain on the Bridge
I think that the captain should be able to issue instructions to his crew on the fly. As well as open up voice chat for senior staff on the fly.
An evolution of this would have the branching conversation tree with other captains have keywords that captains would be able to 'say' to communicate with them. If you have a fully PC bridge team and some voice recognition for command buffs, potenitally, a captain could talk his way through the game. Might be a bit ambitious.
B) Ready Room
Having the senior officers sitting around talking in a dynamic cutscene, especially if mouths move to match voices as best as possible... that could be kind of fun. It could add a kind of usefulness to the ready room for quick planing and such.
For hardcore gamers who belong to uberguilds it may not be very useful, but a great deal of the player base could get some real use out of it.
