See this is the dilemma of the comms panel: it's essentially a fully featured instant messaging client within the game. And if you think back to when ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Gadu-gadu, QQ, and even stranger beasts ruled the earth, everyone wanted their own display style - big chat heads, small chat heads, icons, background wallpaper, speech bubbles, mergeable consecutive messages by same sender. By adding 'chat heads' to the UI, Frontier have opened that Pandora's box again and are having yet again to build out one part of the game to the same fidelity as standalone apps that are developed by entire companies in the real world.
Having spent years as an IM client developer and implemented themeable contact list and message panes, I was quite glad thankyouverymuch when we only had 7 bit ALL CAPS text messages. Has there been a feature request to support emoji in messages yet? Can we have an XMPP gateway to Galnet Messenger?