Speaking of things not taken, here's what I think is a good example of content that's not so involved that it hurts to see it skipped, but also still helpful for creating a potentially good encounter. (He's a guy living in a boarding house.) I'm thinking maybe I should shoot for this level of detail.
It's been a while, but I think that was lacking in the last D&D session was good pacing. I mean, it felt more like an episode of Poirot than D&D. (I was going to say "epic fantasy" but our adventures are very rarely epic.) Some of it was partly because of the nature of being in a town and having mysteries to solve. (For example, Poirot was often in a town with mysteries to solve.) But perhaps I didn't have the right events to stir things up.
Back in the day (meaning high school), if I felt there was a pacing problem, I'd just have monsters show up and attack the party. Obviously, that is dumb, but most of the "insert anywhere" events I had worked out for this game were more mysteries or aspects of the existing mysteries. Almost none of them contained pressure of any sort and were not very capable of fixing a 🤔 sort of pace.
Well, the PCs did figure some stuff out and marched wirh unforeseen determination to a dungeon, so things will probably be a bit easier on that front now.