Trimming and deleting without changing length on a multitrack file

This is an interesting one and I can see each painful edit there in your example!

As Steve mentions there isn't really an automated way to do this in multitrack. What you could also consider is inserting noise gates on all the tracks and setting the threshold so that the track is silent when speech is not heard (above a certain dB level). This is the next best thing and you then wouldn't need to make the cuts as Adobe Audition would automatically mute tracks when there is no speech.

No, I'm afraid that there really aren't any shortcuts to getting speech to sound coherent. The only thing you can do is practice, really. All speech is different, and you'd need the software to understand the relevance of what it was doing - which of course it simply can't do.

The usual way to do this is to mix everything down to a single file, and just edit that so that it's coherent. It's a podcast - as long as people can get the meaning out of it without switching off, that's fine - you don't have to go to obsessive lengths to get it perfect, and once you've got into the swing of it, this sort of de-umming and de-erring (the trade term for what you're doing) becomes second nature and much quicker.