How can Teams replace skype??

BumSkull I realize I am a couple years late to this discussion but I am in the midst of being forced to remove Skype for Business from all the computers I manage. I am expected to replace it with some strange mixture of Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, and Cisco WebEx Desktop App - I too am baffled as to how Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business especially when it comes to the 1:1 chat and most importantly easy visibility of the 'Presence' of ones immediate coworkers.

Skype for Business allowed me to add our internal departments to the contacts list via their Active Directory Security Enabled Distribution Groups so that the contact lists would update for all users dynamically as those groups were changed on the backend. So each new computer/user I setup, I logged them into S4B and outlook, added all the 'groups' related to their work area in the company so that on Day 1 they had the 'people' they would need to interact with. How else does someone on their first day have any clue of all the people to manually add to their contacts. Plus, to be honest, why would I want my staff wasting their time on busy work like manually adding contact after contact into 'groups' they create themselves? How will they know when a person leaves or starts for the company who works in another location?

Now it seems that my only option might be to create an 'all staff' Team (even though we do not plan to enable any Teams for anyone at all - very old school, no group collaboration - people say they have enough trouble managing their email, texts, voicemails, and phone calls, without adding tons of teams/channels they also have to monitor) but if did create an all staff 'team' it would be just to allow people to click into THREE submenus to 'see' the 'members' list and their coworkers statuses.

It is unclear if these 'groups' update themselves dynamically either or if I will have to manage the membership in Active Directory and in Teams as the admin/owner.  I have been researching all these products and options for several weeks now and as far as I can tell the only way to interact with 'groups' that live in active directory is to send a chat to the group - not to add the group to your contacts list to easily populate all contacts within your department at one time for 1:1 chat.

Why would they remove this functionality? Really seems to be a step backward. One of my staff said they have resorted to opening an email, addressing it to the distribution list they saw in Skype for Business, expanding it, and then were disappointed because most people just have a blank white dot now that we have so many options to sign into and hardly anyone is aware what to sign into at all. What a total mess. 

Maybe the issue is that, due to security concerns and upper management decisions, we are still a hybrid environment with on-premises exchange servers not email online in the cloud.