Joystiq - Voice acting - more trouble than it's worth

Joystiq's Rowan Kaiser returns with his regular column, this time looking at voice-acting in RPGs. The piece references developers like Brenda Brathwaite and Chris Avellone on the pitfalls of voice-acting:

"Great ideas were left sitting on the bench because the time to record them (or render graphics) wasn't available," she said in her reply.    

Was this a normal issue facing RPG developers? I started a quick conversation with Chris Avellone of Obsidian Entertainment – designer of famous RPGs like Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas expansions – about player choice in cinematic RPGs, and he volunteered, unprompted, some of his issues with recorded speech. "I don't enjoy doing cinematic conversations for a variety of reasons, but I have done them as part of my job."

Avellone described three main issues: first, that it disrupts his design process; second, his personal preference in terms of role-playing; and third, that their hard work that may not bear fruit.