Skype was P2P pre-acquisition.

Microsoft’s acquisition changed Skype to centralize it through their servers (and introduce all sorts of call quality issues).

It’s less about focusing on tinfoil and more about how creating $ for cloud usage, which allowed for centralization and surveillance.

Skype has been enough of a turn off from the performance issues it has / had hat many people moved elsewhere.

In the early 2000s there was a lot of discussion about a US law that required phone providers to provide for wiretapping, with no mention of the underlying tech. Being P2P, that wouldn't work for Skype, so a journalist asked the Skype CEO whether they would comply with the law and he said "We're not US company. Why would we?"

So I don't think it's all that tinfoily to think that once Skype became a US company, the government might have pressured them into making wiretaps possible, since there was a specific law that arguably required it. Considering all that Snowden revealed later, I'm not sure I'd put any digital surveillance in the tinfoil category.