The use of comms generally is wildly inconsistent in 24th century Trek and required a computer that was very intelligent at realising when people wanted to transmit and not.
Sometimes they tap their combadge or a panel to start talking, other times they just say 'Sisko to Dax' into thin air. Sometimes they tap to answer, sometimes they just say 'Worf here'. Sometimes they 'hang up' by word or gesture, other times they'll just say 'on my way' or similar and somehow that cuts off the transmission.
And it is never clear how private the comms are - the implication from the audio is that the incoming sound is just broadcast for all to hear - which as well as being very bad at handling sensitive or private information would make a busy ship deafening. Imagine how bad mobiles would be if they only had speakerphone mode.
Just think of your latter comment as a training exercise. If it happens only occasionally, it's clearly a method of introducing the crew to the implication of being part of the Borg hive mind. If it's done often enough, maybe one can be inured to reducing the clutter to so much white noise and possibly be able to keep one's wits and individuality intact.
There was one scene depicting Tuvok and Kim having what amounted to a private conversation on the bridge. I can't remember the episode but the conversation was along the lines of "Don't do that. It makes people nervous."
The Cloud- Tuvok dresses Kim down for impermissible behavior on the bridge by a senior officer, to wit, proclaiming ignorance about a newly encountered phenomena. Kim returns the favor later in the episode when Tuvok makes a similar statement to Janeway.
What makes the decision stupid was the utter lack of consideration for options that worked for both sides. Even in her damaged state, 24th century technology should have afforded Voyager the ability to arrange for the array's destruction after the ship returned to the Alpha Quadrant. Tuvok even said he could make the damn thing send them back, so use it and leave torpedoes with delay timers to blow it up. That means no series? Fine by me. The resulting series sucked anyway.
But if you're desperate to have a series, take the decision out of the crew's hands. Either make it suffer a catastrophic failure or get moved and hidden by the Caretaker's spouse or some automatic system or whatever.
The failure to sell the "strand yourself" premise comes from a simple fact: it was a situation where stranding themselves wasn't necessary. There is no way to properly sell an action that nobody needs to take. Writers getting paid to write TV shows ought to know that and not base entire shows on the utter foolishness of the main character.
(Unless we're talking Archie Bunker or Homer Simpson, but they ain't Trek.)
If you have contempt for everything on the series and presumably would make it disappear if you had the ability to do so, what relevance should anyone give to criticism you render about the premise of the premiere? Reasonably, a good number of posters here have a great bit more knowledge about Trek in general and Voyager specifically than you do, and yet mysteriously, one doesn't encounter this irrelevant rant that is basically just a tooth fairy's wish. Yes, I think everyone with any kind of knowledge of the show understands the underpinning of what propels the show into its adventure, how it could've been avoided, and why it wasn't. Yet you seem to be among the brave few who wish to inflict an Excedrin headache regarding what seems to universally be accepted, even with reservations by some, as an adequately reasonable prologue to what will ensue. In fact, I think quite a good number of viewers consider it the best of the Trek debuts.
On the other hand, if you were to excise your comments about Caretaker, being reconciled that people perfectly understood your thoughts about it, perhaps we'd only have to look forward to similar screeds about the other 170 episodes. In which case, by all means keep your focus on Caretaker.
By the way, forgive my lack of clarity on this point, but who exactly is the target for your ad hominem attacks, the show runners who wrote the episode or Janeway? Maybe it's me, but that seems to get a bit shaken sometimes in your diatribes.
I work in a mobile phone store, sometimes foreign customers come in with their phones set to different languages asking for help. 9 times out of 10 I can figure my way around the phone and do what they want me to do. Not quite the same situation, but I reckon anyone competent enough with the principles of a piece of technology can work their way around a language barrier. Scotty can operate the transporter too, and Sulu and Chekov have been flying/navigating starships for 20+ years at this point.
Commenting on this recently, I think I can be resolved that control systems that operate on similar principles, won't be too unlikely to have their basic function intuited and the requisite operation configurations be able to be reckoned pretty quickly, regardless of the total unfamiliarity of language prompts. OK, maybe not in 2-5 seconds, but with a reasonable quotient of speed. I have to think that this is what the writers throughout time have posited and as with noise being propagated through space, I don't tend to think about it too much anymore. Now if a ship constructed by an overwhelmingly advanced civilization were in play, that would be a different story. Although a number of those races don't have the need for ships anyway, so...
fficer ratio of his army was about 80:1, now it's about 5:1. As automation improves you need more and more training to be useful. 
Just remember to buy me those Kleenex disposable hand towels because I don't like to use my pants. 
