Not disagreeing with your experiences (because they're yours, not mine) but I've been pretty happy with Hangouts. I default to Hangouts because most everyone I

Not disagreeing with your experiences (because they're yours, not mine) but I've been pretty happy with Hangouts. I default to Hangouts because most everyone I chat with has it installed and it performs better (for me) than SMS/MMS which can be slow, limited, and compress the hell out of attached media. But if someone doesn't use it, or isn't online, I can just tap the little voice bubble icon (mobile version) on the bottom of the chat where you type in your message and it lets you switch to SMS and back. Also that is weird that you don't see people as online/offline. Mine (again, mobile version) shows the person with a green voice bubble if they are online or a grey one if they aren't. It shows the last time they were seen and inside the chat, it shows their little avatar/icon below the last message they read. I can certainly understand wanting to use a different SMS client (which I'm pretty sure you can do easily) and being able to choose different default apps is one of the things I like about Android in general. I haven't used it on a tablet since I broke my Nexus 7 but from what I've seen in the web version and the phone version (both iOS and Android), it's gotten much better since the initial move from Talk to Hangouts.