I thought this would be a solved issue, as it's a fundamental business process for thousands of different businesses that log calls and emails via Tasks.

Please let me know if I'm missing something obvious, but there seems to be a serious problem with how to measure incoming and out going calls.

When logging a call, we have a "Type" a "Subject".

There is a standard SFDC field on Activities called "Call Type"

Typically Business have incoming and outgoing (or internal) calls and emails, 

So this field "Call Type" has the non editable values of "Inbound, Outbound, Internal"

When a user is logging a call - they should create the "Subject" the "Type" should be Call/email/etc and the "Call Type" should be as above.

For some strange reason when in the edit page of creating a Task "Call Type" is a locked, blank, non editable field. There is no help entry information on this field.

I can only assume that it knows if an email is "Inbound, Outbound, Internal" But this has nothing to do with Phone calls being logged by users. 

Is this some feature that is used with a CTI adapter for Call Center?

If a CTI adapter is not being used how should incoming/outgoing calls be logged?

If I change the values of the "Type" from "Call, Email" to "Call in, Call out, Email In, Email Out" then when creating a custom report type of something as standard as Accounts with Activities, it will not allow me to access the "Type" field, but the "Call Type" field is available for use.

So reporting on Activities, the way Activities are best practice to be used, is in direct contradiction here.

I would have thought this would be solved years ago as it's an essential business process. What am I missing? Is it broken? Or do most people just throw together an inefficient unclear way of logging calls and reporting on them?

If the "Call Type" was an editable pick list - this seems logical and would work for thousands of Businesses.

Instead my best bet seems to recreate the Call Type pick list as a custom field with exactly the same values - which makes reporting problematic as there is 2 identical field names. Perhaps I should call the custom field "Actual Call Type" or Call Type Proper" - What is a user to to think when viewing this field? Maybe "Communication Direction" is a better name for my custom field.