I like to read too, but its nice to have something to put on while you clean up around the house.

>Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever.

this is an issue, but I think it is solved by maintaining an active subreddit or discussion forum to discuss the episodes as they are released.