Were those the ONLY conversations they'd have, though? Or was that just in addition to being able to talk to them? To be honest, I didn't think that walking across the bridge in the zombie town over and over to hear party banter was all that great either.
No, you could talk to them in camp, but it wasn't done in the same fashion. Usually it would just consist of you walking up to them and then you have the conversation with them and it's over. In some situations depending on influence, they would initiate a dialogue during camp. You might get a few other conversations scattered throughout but all in all there wasn't much there in the 'camp,' and it didn't seem like the NPC's had enough dialogue
In a sense, I guess it accomplishes the same purpose, but it feels less organic, and with the NPC's just didn't have as much dialogue, hopefully that was an issue of it being a terrible expansion and not reflecting a deemphasis in that regard.