The Delights and Challenges of Dialogue

I feel like many authors would agree that dialogue is both a joy and a little bit of a nuisance to write. Conversations are such critical elements in fiction, allowing the characters to meet, interact, develop, perform, discover and figure out. For all the incredibly eloquent descriptions we might pour onto a page, for all the telling we do in paragraph form, expressing action or thoughts or settings or appearances, what the characters talk about makes a story interesting, compelling, relatable ...