Count me among those who liked the lyrical feel of the story, but who had some trouble following it on audio. I know that I missed a lot of what made this story beautiful.
It actually shows me one of the issues that an audio fiction publication must have. When you are producing written fiction, you can assume that your readers all come to the text at roughly the same level. Sure, some may be sitting on a subway train, and some may be sitting in their study, but physically reading text requires a base level of concentration and dedication of senses that you can assume your reader is bringing to the text.
For a podcast, though, you are catching people at all different points on the attention/distraction continuum. Some listen at home in peace with full attention. Some, like me, listen while commuting. Some listen while cooking dinner and keeping the toddler from attacking the dog.
As a commuter, I tend to prefer plot-driven stories that will help keep my attention even as I keep some decent part of my brain dedicated to not rear-ending school buses and the like.
But Escape Artists would be poorer if it only catered to folks like me. Some of the best speculative writing is lyrical, and complex, and not plot-driven. And it would be unfair to the writers, and to EA, and to the listeners who do listen in a 100%-attention kind of way to only provide plot-driven stories.
It must be a hard balance, and I think that EA strikes it pretty well across the three casts. Even though that means that I know that I will sometimes hear a story that I end up missing out on the best parts of because of my choice as to how I listen.
(Finally, upon re-reading that, it looks like I am calling this story plotless. I am not. I am just using "plot-driven" as a shorthand to distinguish those stories where I think that the best parts of it are parts that reward a level of attention that I am just not able to give.)