Agreed, it also critically limits modding capabilities (though I don't know to what degree, if any, Runemaster will be moddable). You can see the difference in the mods that were put out for morrowind vs Oblivion/Skyrim. Morrowind was dominated in large part by quest mods, new landmasses, characters and dialogue. Oblivion and Skyrim are dominated by visual mods, mostly, since it is very hard to do anything that would require new dialog without it sticking out like a sore thumb due to no voice acting or low-quality recordings.
As someone who still plays all three games and hunts every mod worth having, let me tell that this is a big wrong. All three have Visual Mods (and MW almost only them nowadays unfortunately) and all of them have an equal amount of Quest mods... which speaks a lot seeing as MW is much older and you'd expect it to have 3 times more than Skyrim, yet Skyrim actually has a LOT of quest mods, and almost all of them are voiced, both major and minor (and those that are not, usually get with the next release as someone volunteers to give the voices... as a matter of fact, I have 100 mods and I remember only one lacking VA). The most surprising part though is that they are all quality voices.
Not that VA-ing ever stopped anyone: most of OB quest mods don't have VA, yet they are still popular.
In other words, VA-ing doesn't matter to modders. And if the community is large, finding a VA is not even that hard.
Back on topic, I never expected PI to put in Voice Acting in the first place. For a small studio, that is too expensive and the return investment would be too trivial to be worth it. This is something left for AAA Devs who can afford it.