Good Contacts solution when SMSing from Google Voice

Hi.

I use Google Voice for SMS on my phone. This is to save money and also to keep all SMS's together on the GV webpage, app, etc...

The problem: I've noticed it's quite awkward (impossible?) to send a message from the stock Contacts app and other apps through Google Voice.

Say I want to start from the Contacts app (stock t-mobile) and look up a contact. If I then pick "send SMS", it will use my phone's normal SMS function with my carrier, and not Google Voice as I would like it to. I haven't found a setting either in the Contacts app, or in the Google Voice app or elsewhere that controls this.

(I realize that if I start to write an SMS from the Google Voice app, it will auto-complete from my existing contacts, but I'd also like to be able to do it from contacts)

3 questions:

1) Is there a simple way to solve this with settings (that I'm just missing)?
2) If not (and you're pretty sure there's not...) what dailer app would you recommend that *does* solve it? (My general experience with a few of them is that they don't play well with Google contacts and Google Voice some of the time)

3) As a helpful aside to this problem, one of the things that has annoyed me about the 2 or 3 dialer apps I've tried is that there is no way to set them to create a new contact *by default* in a particular group in Google Contacts. Say I'm travelling in France. I have a "France" group in my Contacts which is what I've set to show up on my phone --since I don't want to scroll through my zillion US contacts while I'm there. So now, I really want any contact I enter into the phone (say quickly, at a bus stop or a cafe or a meeting) to be added to *that* group by default. Please oh please, fellow Android lovers, tell me there's a decent Contacts / dialer app that does this also! :- )

Phone info: HTC MyTouch 4G Slide, t-mobile in USA

thanks,
A