Your suggestion basically boils down to "assume that everything is shit"
Not at all. My suggestion is that if something is unenjoyable, it's a good idea to question whether you should be doing it. I'm continually surprised by the reaction of people who feel they must do everything, no matter how much they hate it,
just in case there is some reward they might or might not want. After the first 2 hours of the fishing minigame, you can either choose to say, "This is boring, I think I'll move on", or you can say, "I hate this, but only 58 hours to go! I sure hope Joe's Trinket is worth it!" To me, one of these looks like a bad decision.
So you slog through unenjoyable content
But the point is it should be enjoyable content.
I agree that good is better than bad. It would indeed be nice if every activity, every side quest, every crafting system, every NPC, every item description, every cutscene, every branch of every dialogue in every game was 100% orgasmically enjoyable to 100% of players. As it turns out, in some games this is not the case. Frowny face.
In the end I skipped most of the mindless blather in SR:HK. But when people are skipping a lot of content in a game because of it's poor quality it indicates a problem with the game.
The thing is, the problem is not in the blather itself, but that a) there's a lot of it and b) players think they have to read it all for some reason. The problem would indeed be solved if a) there was less of it. The problem would
also be solved if b) a given player realizes he's not intended to read it all. Which one of those two things do you as a player have direct control over?
Let's quickly recap the conversation that led to this thread in the first place.
X: The writing in SRHK is bad because there's too much of it.
Z: So don't read it all. You don't have to ask every fish vendor for his life story.
X: Yes I do! You get xp for some conversations.
Z: So let a few xp go, who cares?
X: Getting some xp is necessary to win the game, therefore I must get
all xp!
Z: What are you, stupid?