I find it as listenable as the podcasts the people I'm around play in their cars during roadtrips

To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.

Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well. They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library, and then interject each other every other word with nonsense, before getting back to the point for just one sentence.