It's not an oversight, and ultimately you can't stop people communicating outside of your site with all the available social media links available and means of contacting each other that way. Relative to the projects though, they still need to use the site to offer ratings and reviews (which in turn helps as they continue to seek work through the site), and for things such as Escrow payments, they need to update the status in order for payments to be made etc.. Perhaps this is something that may be implemented at a later date, both themes are relatively new, so new features are being added with every major release. Thanks.
