When you "skip over" every lead that is a dud, are you skipping over scenes that actually could be played out and have weight to them? This is why I said what I said earlier, about being focused on that specific thing.
Because this isn't "we don't pay attention to the times where you're asleep or using the bathroom" stuff. This is skipping over actual situations that test your skills and abilities, but which turn out to be a complete waste of time.
Doing that is not a matter of "we don't have infinite time to play." It is, very specifically, avoiding something because doing it would be boring or irritating pacing--shortening "duds" to just a few descriptive sentences, or even just cutting out duds entirely, never having duds in the first place. That is, absolutely, a narrative conceit: "Don't waste the audience's time with empty action." It is not a matter of pure time-saving practicality; it is a matter of steering the focus-of-attention so that it either only looks at things that are "interesting," or reduces "uninteresting" things into mere sentences.
Yes, time-saving practicality is one of the reasons we, for example, do not spend 8 hours of play-time where the characters are asleep. Time-saving practicality is not why a person would say, "I don't really ever include dud rumors; if the PCs hear a rumor, there's something to it." Which is precisely the sort of thing that was mentioned upthread, and why I kept saying that you had inserted yourself into a conversation about that, but which you seem stubbornly unwilling to even remotely consider.
