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Some small points of order in defense of audio folks:
1.) You're talking about a mixing problem, not an editing problem. On any reasonably-sized production these two jobs are done entirely separately, by different people. It's still an audio person's fault, but if you're going through the credits looking for your nemesis, it's the mixer, not the editor.
2.) Mixing is actually a very difficult job these days, because everyone has such a different speaker setup in their homes. You've got standard left-right, surround sound (with and without a subwoofer,) fancy left-right speakers that claim they can imitate surround sound (they can't really, it's a lie, though there are some headphones that can do a decent job,) and fancy all-in-one tuners with a dozen presets that take the audio signals from your TV and alter them in any number of ways the sound mixer never intended.
So for example, in a typical surround-sound setup, the traditional thing to do is put all speech coming out of the center channel, and background music would be split between the right and left channels. But depending on the budget and disc space, they may only be able to put one audio track on the DVD (as opposed to the instances where, in the setup menu, you see the option to choose Dolby 5.1 versus stereo.) So the question then becomes, do you put a surround mix on the disc, and let the stereo systems out there in the world squash the multiple signals into just two channels, thus throwing your mix off to a certain degree (if your speech audio is now getting split to either side of the room, it will need to be louder than when it was coming directly at you from the middle.) Or, do you put a stereo mix on the disc, and let the surround systems artificially duplicate the same signal coming out of multiple speakers? Well, which is going to piss off more people? Typically, the people who sprung for more expensive sound systems are the ones who care more about what it sounds like, so they're going to be disproportionately pissed off by improperly-mixed audio. And you won't be able to put "surround sound" on the box, which marketing won't like. What's more, a good portion of the stereo-crowd are going to be listening on inherently sucktacular internal speakers, and it's going to sound bad for them no matter what you do. As time passes, more and more people have surround systems anyway, so it's easy to see how it's the default choice if you only get one.
I can't tell you how many times I had developers/testers/producers/executives tell me the audio sounded inadequate in some fashion or another, and I told them to come up to my office and show me where the problem was... and every single one would realize it was actually because their sound system sucked, not the game audio.
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