You know there's a programmed delay between the start times of looped NPC dialogue, and it seems to be universal. They wouldn't have to program in any mutes or anything. They just have to increase the delay. It's probably one value stored in a variable, or perhaps simply hard-coded. All they'd need to do to reduce the chatter would be to increase the number dictating the delay. Changing the delay to begin at the end of the loop instead of the beginning would definitely take more work than that, but a simply increase in delay (without any other changes) would probably be as simple as changing a single number in the code.
While the looped NPC chatter may make the world feel more alive, the frequency with which the NPCs speak makes it seem less alive and more like broken automation. I don't feel like these are people. They're more like robots. Makes it feel more like an automated factory than a living, breathing world. It's also just irritating as
