We used to be able to skip the cutscenes in the 8 man story duties but people who chose to sit there and watch them all started crying because the people not watching them would clear the duty in the time it took to watch all the cutscenes.

So SE chose to appease the noisy minority and force everyone to watch them regardless and the amount of people actually queuing for them dropped considerably. The queue time for it was quite bad the last time I recall queuing for it. However that was a number of months ago.