Now that I've seen the issue framed in those terms, I can think of several cases where someone spent so long on niceness-padding that I got annoyed, lost interest, or interrupted to ask them to get to the point. I would like to add that the niceness/efficiency tradeoff is continuous, not discrete, bounded on the maximally-efficient end and unbounded on the maximally-nice end, and that there must be some amount of niceness-padding so excessive that will annoy even those who prefer prefer more of it in general.