As far as I'm concerned, it's a voice, not a person. I don't want a person chattering in my ear when what I want is the text. The voiceover artist's job is, in fact, to be a better TTS.

Hm, that's interesting, because I generally look for just the opposite in podcasts, particularly fiction.

When I read text, the voice in my head emphasizes certain parts and changes tone in response to the content of the text, at a reasonably high level of abstraction (i.e. just looking at the syntax and formatting isn't enough). If a narrator isn't doing that, I have a hard time getting into the reading.