I would prefer if I could, in good conscience, turn off subtitles all the time and simply go with the audio as if it were a video I was watching. Maybe it's just my picky impaired hearing, but it's happened far too many times that I just plain couldn't understand what was being said in a game because of volume, bad voice acting, or whatever and HAD to rely on subtitles.

It's a better safe than sorry type of situation for me nowadays. I'd rather not miss an important bit of dialogue for any reason since I'd have to replay the scene in order to catch it again. And that just plain ruins the running atmosphere of a game. The subtitles make sure I'm in tune with what's going on as much as possible as smoothly as possible, so I deals with 'em.