Technically, it was never supposed to be a group think space, as Tal’s telepathy doesn’t work like that, by RAW. Instead, he would need to send messages from A to B and from B back to A, etc.

In practice, however, this would be cumbersome: Mir sends a message to Tal for Merrick, Tal sends the message to Merrick, Merrick responds to Tal, Tal . . .

And not just cumbersome: it makes things all-about-Tal-all-the-time, which ugh! I have always preferred being a support character, not the main focus. So I was more than happy to let it go as it went, RAW be damned. 😅

As for Tal, himself, he does communicate predominantly by telepathy, for obvious reasons. (The rest of you refuse to learn bark-and-growl.) Verbalizing is a challenge, and he must constantly remind himself to use his voice when in human form.