In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.

Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.

I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.

Audiobooks can do a lot to give _character_ to characters that are otherwise quite flat.