As far as I understand, it is entirely true that Google's Hangout, or Skype, are easy to use. Of the free variants, I mainly have experience with Mumble, which usually works, but requires tweaking and configuration to work well.
The other aspect, however, is that Hangout and Skype are not free. It is not unacceptable for those developing Debian to use non-free software, or non-free services, but it gets problematic if it's the common case, or if it is advocated. We, as a project, value software freedome, and if we choose tools that are not free, we are not living up to our values as a project. To find out if a service like this is actually useful for distributed bug squashing, by all means, let's use the proprietary services. Then we can find or make the free software to do it with freedom. -- I wrote a book: http://gtdfh.branchable.com/
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