That said, I REALLY like voice acted MCs.
I agree with most of what you've said (well, written, but same thing), but this part I emphatically disagree with. Voice acted protagonists leads to every single line having to be acted out by a voice artist, which usually collides with budget considerations and leads to there being just two voices to pick from, one male, one female, and both of them are done by budget voice actors who really needed the money and who don't care one bit about context.
And this in turn makes it so much harder to properly identify with the protagonist. It works well enough in games where you're playing a fixed person who has a fixed background and a fixed voice, but in these "create your own character" games it just tends to be bad. Bethesda couldn't execute it properly in FO4 and CDPR messed it up in CP77, and in both cases they had a triple-A budget to play with but it still wasn't enough.
FO4 male voice completely lacked the gruffness that I would have expected from a decorated soldier dumped into a desperate survival situation where training and survival basics is everything. Instead every dialogue is polished sociology major verbiage, with barely any aggression to be found anywhere. No rah-rah machismo nonsense to simplify the complexities of life, no reverting to total war "friend or foe" mentality, not even any cold utilitarian rationality. There's literally not a single dialogue choice that feels in character, and not a single one of them is delivered with subdued rage to mask the fear of having lost one's infant child and the sorrow of the dead spouse. There's a little bit of overt sorrow early on, then nothing.
FO4 female is slightly better, she's supposed to have been a lawyer and military wife, so the lines fit her a little better, but the lines don't really fit a half-decent and half-sharp lawyer either. There's a distinct lack of the aggressively difficult phrasing that lawyers seem to have an undue fondness of, additionally also an absense of absolutely essential run-on sentences to form the properly complex language for which the practioners of legalese are rightly, in such parts of the worlds where proper legal traditions are practiced and maintained, quite infamous. There's also none of the smugness or superiority complex that I reckon would be an essential requirement of making it through any law school. And show me a lawyer that won't happily go into blabber-mode when given half a chance to do so.
CP77 male V sounds like such an uneducated punk most of the time. Not a very emotional delivery but not a proper "harsh life" one either. What backgrounds does that really fit with? And remember that this is a brutal world where killing other people is very common and very one's survival is often happening at the literal expense of other people. Is it too much to ask for just a little bit of occasional anger? Some righteous fury at times? And I really miss that typical male aggression. And I miss having some chances of going for rah-rah machismo to build up confidence and keep the problem scope simple. But all the dialogue for both genders is exactly the same, so all voice lines are some unisex bullshit that feels a little wrong regardless of gender.
CP77 female V is a much more reputed voice artist and she does put more emotion into it, but even then she has some problems here and there, and the unisex dialogue probably fits her better. The lack of truly feminine options feels more forgivable in a super-harsh world where "masculine" aggression and war-face has a bigger role than "female" understanding and empathy. Or maybe that's my own latent male bias shining through. Either way, I found her playable but not really enjoyable. And I felt like I still had to sort of build my understanding of my V around her voice delivery. I couldn't be a hardass and I couldn't be hyper-intellectual. I couldn't really be streetsmart either, but that's mostly because CDPR's story falls apart completely unless V is dumber than a fire hydrant and naive enough to actually help out a Nigerian prince in exile.
So I would really, really prefer that Larian doesn't make a pig's breakfast out of voicing the MC and instead spends money on giving us more voice options than two per gender, which I find to be on the low end. I want a proper grumpy dwarf voice, I want a proper light halfling voice, I want proper melodic elves and I want deep-chested hoarse half-orcs. And I cannot imagine that we're getting that if Larian has every MC dialogue option voiced.
