Good question about the npc chat camera. I'll check it out. I'm intending to do some work on that camera anyway and make it a bit more like a video I saw of the dialog in KOTOR.
I debated doing a "Continue" button of some kind for the chat bubbles as well but I think that could get very annoying too. Probably if you can't see the bubbles you should just disable them entirely. Incidentally, we're only talking about 3-4 bubbles here--not some long string of never-ending bubbles (I hope :-))--and the duration of the bubble depends on the length of the text, so it is just a few shorter bubbles instead of one huge one that stays up a long time. Perhaps we need a slider bar in Options for how long each one stays, since some people zip through them and other non-native English speakers probably need extra time to read everything.
As with every feature, it seems, it's a balancing act of fun, good for players, flexible but not annoying, and complexity to code.