Maybe you could help us choose which encounters we do and which we don't - let's say we scout effectively. Before we enter anywhere, we have SOME info.
So we can know the interesting (room with the eye-shield and the corpses) from "grind" rooms.
You can cover resource attrition by making those fewer encounters harder OR by randomly doing trap damage or similar effects.
This gets us both interesting encounters and important points (at the cost of not skipping anything important by accident since you offer us a descriptions) and avoid encounters that take time for no meaningful gain.
As for the investigation, I'm for clearing the current level - again, not just going through all rooms to kill some zombies, but to find out what we can

Ussal can ask advice from his "spirit ring"