They said switching speakers mid-dialogue would lead to too many permutations to be able to do.
That's fine and understandable. No one is expecting a 5+ people conversation that can go anywhere. But not letting party members to use their skills is not ok. Gale could easily interject with a History skill check, which would then give the speaker the knowledge to continue on that branch. There are many situations where everyone in the party should be allowed to roll a skill check, even if only one is doing the talking.
It wouldn't necessarily lead to any additional permutations though..? Any character *can* be the speaker in a conversation, and thus the lines are already written for them. A "swap speaker" button would only need an additional 10(?) lines in the entire game, one for each character to say "Let me respond to that." Then the new speaker would proceed from that point in the conversation just as if they were always the original speaker.
I suppose there may be oddities for conversations that drastically change depending on the character-specific choices made earlier in the conversation before you swapped, but these are probably a minority of conversations and I can think of a few ways this could be relatively simply dealt with. E.g., have the just game retroactively choose whatever choices would lead to the current conversation, or just continue along the original speaker's conversation path and only allow the new speaker to make generic, skill-based, or class-based dialogue lines.
