Well, I think there's a difference between being unable to find current contact information for an author and going ahead and recording a podfic, and choosing to record a fic over the author's objection.

You're right that stories aren't fungible, and I shouldn't have implied they were. As a writer, I find that there's never just one story I want to tell, though, even if I'm focused on a specific pairing or fandom. And from a listener's perspective, there's so much out there yet unrecorded. There's no one specific story I've been wishing someone would do.