Funny - because just last week I setup new dummy google plus accounts for various family members in Europe and India so we could use hangouts without polluting our regular gmail accounts with Google+ nonsense.
We won't need that anymore - We were perfectly happy with Skype, but missed group video.
I work for Google, so I'm obviously biased here, though I don't always like everything we do around our sites and integration.
But, I'm genuinely curious, what nonsense does Google+ pollute your regular Google account with? I believe that you get a profile page, but you can leave it entirely blank.
If you're seriously asking, I'm happy to answer my two cents, but i'm very concerned that you don't have a sense for the reasons people would want to use G+ gated products without being part of G+.
As someone who has a personal G+ account and doesn't mind, and who runs a company that pays Google for apps for my domain on which we manage our email, I still had to register for G+ to be able to use the hangouts product in invitations and threads I'm having with my work email. Now that I've done so (without adding a profile photo or anything else), i'm getting tons of people adding me to circles, etc., which I don't want. It's essentially forcing a social-connection construct on a relationship with an empty profile that I don't want to create or have to maintain.
well to be fair, plenty of google employees are/have-been fully aware of (and vocal about) the various problems with forced G+ integrations on users. It's just that those employees haven't had any power to change those decisions. With the recent changes in leadership, things may change.
I'll answer. I keep getting annoying notification numbers in the top right corner of every Google page.
If it were Gmail, that would be really useful. But it's not. It's "Bobby Noname added you to a circle!" and "Joe I'veNeverHeardOf invited you to a hangout!" and "Spammy McSpammer liked a your video on YouTube!"
I don't need or want any of that nonsense. G+ isn't useful to me, but I don't have any way of turning off the notifications.
I add to this "concern". The reason I would not use G+ Hangout (although it may be a fine product, based on the feedback I have seen) is because I do not trust Google for all kinds of deep integration in multiple products.
I am fine using Skype with one particular ID because I am not using that ID on any other system. And that is how I prefer to use Internet everywhere, which I am sure many do as well.
I stopped using YouTube for commenting because of this reason exactly.
We won't need that anymore - We were perfectly happy with Skype, but missed group video.