Imagine you are an NLP engineer in the year 2005. Your team is developing a new automated customer service chatbot that needs to understand and respond to common user queries. A senior manager questions the team's decision to use a relatively simple n-gram based language model as the core of the system, suggesting it might be too basic for the task. Justify the team's decision, explaining why an n-gram model would have been a practical and powerful choice for such an application during that time period. Your justification should also acknowledge the potential limitations of this approach that the team would need to consider.