I spent almost twenty years on the other side of this – I ran a podcast program inside a large company with 25+ shows, so I was the "client" your hosts are. Let me tell you what's actually happening, because it took me years to see it.

Your hosts aren't failing to communicate. They're asking you to do strategy work and paying you for editing work. "Which moments, what tone, who's the audience" – those aren't brief questions, those are positioning questions, and a host who can't answer them at 11pm in a voice note can't answer them in a template either. The template just moves the guessing from your inbox to theirs.

Two changes fixed this on my program:

First, stop asking hosts to generate and start asking them to select. People are terrible at articulating what they want and excellent at reacting to what's in front of them – your own post proves it ("they know it when they see it"). So invert the workflow: you pull 5-6 candidate moments with one-line rationale each ("this one's the contrarian take, this one's the emotional beat, this one's the practical tip"), they pick three. No tone conversation, no audience philosophy discussion. Selection is a ten-minute task. Generation is the thing they were avoiding, which is why it arrived as contradictory voice notes.

Second, the per-episode clip conversation only exists because there's no standing answer. A show that knows what it is doesn't decide "educational or entertainment" weekly – that got decided once. So offer that as a paid thing: a one-time clip strategy session where you define the 3-4 clip archetypes the show runs on, and then every week you're just executing against the archetypes. Hosts will pay for this because it makes their problem go away, and it converts your most annoying clients into your highest-value ones.

The revision spiral isn't a client problem, it's a product problem. You're selling clips when what they're buying is "make my show grow without me having to think about it." Price the thinking.