The lack of social tools and chat in Elite:Dangerous is simply not understandable.

[Serkor]

Even if you bring friends (made outside of the game) grouping, co-working or even communicating is so futile you have to resort to outside aplications like skype or teamspeak.

In multiplayer games I'm in daily (from combat flight sims to Arma) we mostly use Teamspeak for comms. Works fine, so I don't understand why this is a problem with Elite ?

The only one I see is that it's a sort of "cheat" as you can have voice comms with someone who is 200 Ly away...