Well, when I mentioned a handful of people I was talking specifically about those folks who are troubled by excessive amounts of tells from their friends but are just too polite to tell them to lay off a bit, or just detune.
Honestly, though, maybe I'm the one being the grumbarym here. My gut tells me that the amulets and the tell command are such an integral aspect to the game that removing them would be a hardship, but I suppose it's possible that I'm just too accustomed to having them around to be objective about it.
Your idea about how to go about analyzing the situation seems sound, so maybe we should start listing ways in which we use our amulets and sorting them out into categories like 'Essential', 'Generally good to have', and, 'Probably not a good idea', and we can see if what we end up in the 'Essentials' category matches up with how things are done now, and with any other ideas that might pop up. Anyways, here's my list! I'll number them, because I'm planning on using them in just a little bit.
- Essential Uses -
1) Coordinating meetings with people from across the MUD. This is a pretty big one, so I'll break it down a little.
* Helps hopefuls keep in touch with their FMs and other faith members
* Allows for the formation of groups quickly and neatly, for adventuring or corpse retrieval
* Lets people coordinate meetings outside of Waterdeep if one or more of them can't enter the city
* People generally use it to meet up with friends for less important reasons, too, like hot chocolate in a snowstorm, but that seems pretty important so I'm counting it as part of the essential category, too
2) Emergency assistance vs. mobs, traps, and other non-PC things, ie. "Help! A goblin skeleton wizard chewed off my leg before I killed him and now I'm trapped in his evil lair with his army of deadly mechanical gnome-crafted squirrel golems!". I include this in essentials partly because it promotes grouping (even if only after the poor fellow lost his leg to a feral goblin skeleton wizard, which ought to teach him for next time), and thus RP.
- 'Would be nice' uses -
3) Allows for at least some RP when a character wouldn't otherwise be able to RP. Using myself as an example, my character, because of his circumstances, rarely adventures, but he still needs to buy food to avoid starving to death so I occasionally send him up and down the road trading pipeweed or somesuch, alone. It's kind of tedious so I usually resort to amuleting people and striking up a conversation if anyone appropriate logs on while I'm still en route.
4) Questions, fact-checking, and etc., ie. "Hey, I'm an outcast living in the wilderness. What's the latest news in Waterdeep, anyways? Did the Waterdhavian Sahuagins win the big game against the Daggerford Devilfish?"
- 'Probably Actually Not Good Enough, Afraid', AKA Pangea, so let's make like the continent and split this category into its specifics!
5) Emergency assistance against PCs. Right now it's possible to send a quick tell out and have a pack of your friends teleport/fly in literally minutes after you're ambushed on the road. Technically this generates RP so it can't be completely bad, but it seems like sort of a hard luck thing for evils and other folks who'd be of a mind to waylay people and another tricky hoop for them to leap through while trying to ply their trade (ie. Evil!).
6) Chattering back and forth endlessly like gossipy folks on a severe sugar rush. A bit of chatter is well and good but when it gets to the point that people are seeing six or seven tells at one time (I've never gotten more than one or two at a time. Does this mean I'm not popular?
), well, that does seem like it's being used a bit too liberally in some quarters.
I think this about covers everything I can think of off hand. I've reached the point where I'll now try and cobble together the already-offered suggestions to fit the points I made above (which I'll refer to by number), sort of like a Frankensteinesque hodgepodge of ideas.
I think that the charge idea does a really good job of handling (6), the chattery chattersons, but it does create a problem wherein a player might need a tell here or there for one of the essential uses of the amulet and end up high and dry (even if it's through their own carelessness, it can impact other people, too).
Elenthis's idea of being able to go ahead and recharge your amulet at the post or somesuch would work for this. If a PC ends up in a situation where he needs to be able to reply to a tell he can make his way there quickly enough and buy back some charges. Combined with Isaldur's suggestion of giving the person doing the telling an 'Out of Service' message, I think that could work pretty well. Of course, we'd need some sort of neutral postal service where people could go who aren't fond of Waterdeep, or aren't allowed. Preferably a place where any race would be welcome, though I can't think of anywhere like that off the top of my head. Also, if the amulet is recharged too much in a short period of time the postal folks might charge more and more for the service, until the amulet cools down. Practically speaking, to prevent people from standing and gossiping in the mail room while constantly buying recharges the price could scale up higher and higher and not go back down until something like 12 or 24 hours have passed.
Anyways, (2) might still present a problem even with amulet recharging mobs! What happens if Joe the Fighter and Janamairalana the Cleric end up disarmed (literally) during a foray into a nasty den of monsters and need to call for help, but they're both out of tells? Why, expendable emergency tokens of course! They'd be tell-tokens you could buy for probably a pretty high price from the post, I'm thinking at least twice as much as a recharge. Careless folks could carry them around in their packs and if they end up being hit with a spot of bad luck they could pull them out and call for help. I think they should be limited to one or two per customer, though, at any given moment. Otherwise, because of the relative ease with which some people can accumulate money I think they'd be stockpiled, providing an essentially limitless amount of amulet charges and bringing us back to (6).
(3) and (4) seem like they could be handled by simply having players ration their tell charges. The charges themselves could be set up so that every few IC hours one charge is added back up if the amulet isn't already full.
(5) is kind of a sticky one. The best I can think of is to make it so the amulet doesn't always work. Two things that I've thought of to that effect. First off, I think it makes sense for amulets (and therefore tells) to not work in rooms where magic doesn't work. Any sort of dead magic zone would make tells impossible, and hey, on that subject, it'd probably be pretty funny if chaos magic areas caused the words to jumble up or the message to be sent to some random person instead of the intended target
Besides that, though, maybe something could be introduced to disable another character's amulet, like a trap or a special crossbow that shoots out an enchanted spiderweb that wraps itself around the amulet and makes it inaccessible for six hours. Or perhaps something a little less super-villainish. Anyways, regardless of what form it would take, the point is that it would give PCs a chance to counteract their target's call for reinforcements if they take the time to properly plan ahead. Maybe some sort of spell could be used to disrupt an amulet, too, though it'd probably require a new spell, like disjunction or something, which I believe affects magical items. Actually, dispel magic might do that, too, though I'd have to check.
I'm afraid I might have rambled on a bit longer than I had intended, but hopefully there's at least something interesting or useful jumbled up in this mess! Of course this mostly-cribbed suggestion is based on where I've put my priorities with regards to amulet uses and I wouldn't be at all surprised if other people put them in somewhat of a different order. If there's one thing I whole-heartedly agree with Isaldur about it's that there aren't really any ideas that aren't worth mentioning or discussing. Even if they're slightly crazy or completely unfeasible, anything can spark a great idea, or can be shaped into one, etc., etc., etc. To that end, I'd be really interested in learning how other people use their amulets! I guess Isaldur's right about that, too; if we're going to try to modernize amulets, as it were, we ought to first decide as a whole what we want to get out of the process, how we want to be able to use them, and I guess that's the first step.
Anyhow, I'll stop talking now, or typing, rather, and step off the podium, as it were. Thanks for your patience, as this was a particularly lengthy chatter
)
I would add that the "frustration" always seems to fall hardest on the newer players. I've been around as long as most and have seen many changes to alleviate "annoyances" or some perceived abuse. IMO, many seem to just make things harder for the players/PCs who have less resources and weren't skating rules...and the problem players just go and find new ways to make trouble. 
