Some of the games as of late are 3-4 updates with more story than fucking and if you are pretty late game you need a good mix not 70/30 or 80/20 story/fucking
I just wanted to appreciate this comment before addressing the OG post.
I feel like some of the VNs I've gotten into, as they update they add a bunch of fluff without anything particularly enticing. For these, the story
has to be good for me to keep up.
So to start with for story vs sex scenes, for me the story is super important to add context to a scene. It's much hotter when I know the two characters are exploring something for the first time for instance, or are in a risky environment. Without the text I'd have no idea if it was a good scene. So when I do skip, it's typically not to avoid story, but to make sure it's the kind of story I want.
Now, the main post, skipping. Why and how
I skip through content already read, mostly when trying alternate paths. The skip feature in a lot of games is nice cause it's very fast, and stops immediately upon either a new image, or new text, and then I can roll back to see where in the story it was. (this was ideal for Hillside, because each route precludes others, and I was fond of many of the love interests. Lucy is my bae)
I also skip when I'm trying to either see if the sex scenes are worth a damn, and I've not seen any in maybe two hours of game play. Gallery unlocks help with that, as do people with signatures for the game, oddly. But if I do this, and find it appealing, I immediately reload from before I skipped, and continue reading.
I hate clicking or hitting spacebar. Most of the VNs I read are either RenPy or use a similar UI; and one of the things I've noticed is I can set the text speed to instant, and set the auto speed incredibly short. This is not as fast as skip, but it is much faster and less noisy than me clicking constantly.
I do this when I'm trying to catch up where I am in a story, if I've got it on my phone and PC. I did this with Eternum, cause I couldn't put that game down for the life of me.
Now, I have to put a couple caveats in. Bad writing does not necessarily mean the content is bad. The biggest offender for me, when I have to put a story down is when the author is either really bad with English, or it''s clearly been translated from another language really poorly. It's hard to immerse myself in the world and characters when they refer to a bed as a couch repeatedly for instance.