I came to bitch about the same thing. I play Paradox games with my brother all the time, and the lack of chat in Imperator has seriously reduced the likelihood of us playing the game regularly - which makes us both less likely to buy DLC. We both have noisy backgrounds and don't want to have four-hour phone calls every time we have a MP session. The ease of chat functions in games is a major deal of me, and I cannot be the only one (OP confirms that I'm not). EU has highly functional chat which helps make it a constant (CK2 has chat but it disappears into the log, which makes it easier to miss stuff).
But seriously, a lot of grognards are one form of Luddite or another; it seems fairly likely there are a sizable minority of regular Paradox players who aren't Twitch-addicted kids.