So far my only experience with extension:wikilove is having a new user prefer it to just editing my talk page, and so over the course of a mundane conversation about sourcing I earned myself two civility barnstars and three trophies. Hooray!
One take away from this experience of yours could be that the process of utilizing talk pages is extremely arcane and horrible from a user experience perspective, while using WikiLove to communicate - even though it is the "wrong" channel - is far easier and preferable to new users.
Would it be then logical to hang a proper communication tool which eventually would land the user on the talk page where Wikilove now hangs?
Cheers Yaroslav