No, because that would mean I'd have to prep 12 encounters ahead of time. Or improv it, which I can do, but I'd rather not. 4e encounters are usually more fun when you have a few minutes to plan them.
I have the strong feeling from your examples that you run sandbox games, where the story line is directed foremost by the player's actions. I know that many people hold that as the holy grail of how D&D games should be. Personally, I'm not a fan.
On the contrary. Our DM comes up with all of the major plots, subplots, and basic storylines. He decides most of the major directions towards which the PCs go. But as players, we merely reserve the right to just ignore a plot completely and head off in a different direction.
There are 6 people at our table, not 1.
We don't often ignore a plot or head off in a weird direction, but an enviroment where the player's actions and decisions have no real bearing on the overall outcome of the campaign feels railroaded. Personally, I'm not a fan of the DM limiting his campaign to a few select encounters per session and no way for the PCs to go do something other than his limited plan for the day.
As the DM, my games have always run better when I've been the director, not merely the adjudicator. That's why I keep referring to narrative, because to me, that's what the game is.
A pet peeve of mine is something like:
Player 1 (myself): "Let's go to the mine and search it. We might find a clue."
DM: "The PCs found out last session that the mine is flooded."
Player 2: "Let's not go to the mine. It'll be a waste of time cause it's flooded."
As a player, I remembered that the mine was flooded, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to go check it out for myself. By interjecting himself here, the DM is effectively railroading the game away from the area that he did not prepare. He isn't really letting the players decide what the group does, he's strongly influencing the direction of the story by strongly influencing some of the players (and DMs have a lot of influence). It's ok for the mine to be completely flooded (a bit heavy handed by the DM, but no big deal) and the PCs go there and find that out, but there's a problem with the DM just backhandedly cutting it short completely.
If this is what you mean by "being the director", then you can keep it. No thanks.
If this is not what you mean, then fair enough. I personally prefer group story telling without the DM's narrative taking center stage all of the time, but I understand different strokes for different folks.
Let me ask you a different question though.
For those players and DMs who enjoy the occasional dungeon crawl, do you think that the rules should allow for those possibilities?
I'm not talking about forcing you to play a different game style here. I'm talking about allowing for game styles other than the average 5 encounters per day one that WotC more or less forced (shy of the DM going way out of his way to augment resources and/or make encounters so easy that they aren't a challenge at all).