I would assume that a large amount of the public actually feels comforted knowing that there's a real human up in the room with all the buttons making sure the airplane stays in the air. Given, I'd doubt very many of those people are engineers, so I'd assume the HN crowd would mostly consist of people that just want to put on headphones and only be contacted if there's some sort of "exception" thrown at some point in the flight.

My biggest question is how much training airlines give pilots about exactly what to say on these updates - on a recent flight, the pilot said that a critical system in the plane went from "too broken to take off" to "yep, that looks fine" with a couple of restarts just before we left the gate. I'm sure he did everything per spec, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to tell everyone that they are riding on equipment that's only legal because the turn-it-off-and-on-again principle isn't just for IT.