2house2fly said:
(...) but I guess Obsidian couldn't think of something new to do with a "radio station" character.
I'm sure they could come up with any number of quests centered around a radio station (and in fact, they did, and rather creatively IMHO), as could anyone who gave it a modicum of thought. In the case of giving a physical presence to Radio New Vegas, though, I truly think it was more an instance of them asking themselves, "Does this add anything to our game that we actually want in there?" and answering in the negative. They seem to have been shooting to deliver the optimal Fallout experience with New Vegas: Fallout 1's tight, cohesive world without its relative dearth of content, Fallout 2's scope without its bloat, Fallout 3's style of exploration and immersion without its disjointedness. All three of those goals would necessitate that they couldn't just go throwing in quests and locations simply because there was room in the world for them, especially with the kind of accelerated production schedule they were dealing with.
They tied a quest to Black Mountain, but probably felt that the radio deejay who was to deliver news concerning your exploits was probably better left as a voice from afar, in direct contrast to chumming it up with the creepily well-informed and seemingly obsessive Three Dog in the last game. It seems they wanted the radio broadcasts to be more about the world and less about you in New Vegas, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to give you a chance to know the announcer personally. Part of the Fallout setting has always been the ever-present awareness that there's a great wide world out there with a society and a history that has precious little to do with you. It's the necessary counterbalance to you being everyone's errand boy and being present for all of the seminal events of the game. Radio stations complicate that a bit-- it's tough to maintain the sense of being a lonesome drifter in an uncertain world when you can pop in anytime and have a chat with someone who's got eyes and ears on your world entire, or when you know that everyone within a week's traveling distance is constantly hearing you namedropped (Three Dog) or given shout-outs (I'm looking at you, Agatha), but the player still wants to hear about the impact they're having on the world (unless they're a crotchety NMA purist who's never flipped the on switch on their radio in the first place). I think Obsidian walked the tightrope admirably.
(I'm honestly a little surprised people raise this issue at all. Modern games, especially sandboxes and shooters, are replete with all kinds of voices on the radio that you never directly interact with, never even get within a country mile of. Why is it a thing here?)