It's almost exactly like that.
Well, That Sounds Terrible.
Instead, it's usually something along the lines of ...
That Also Sounds Terrible. (Holy railroading, Batman!)
In all seriousness, though, that does indeed sound like a very different play style than anything at all I've ever seen (though I've certainly heard of people with similar styles). And that's fine. There's nothing actually wrong with it, if you and the people you play with enjoy that, which I assume you and they do.
However, I don't think anything you're describing contradicts my point. Ok, so you're put into a situation where you have to fight whoever. Presumably, the goal of the party is now to fight and beat these people. Ok, the chief of secret police comes to your cell and makes you an offer. Presumably, you all accept his offer (or else are not participating in the rest of the plot), and now have some series of shared goals.
By "goals" I don't mean that one guy wants to take over the world, one gal wants to save the princess and defeat the dragon, while the third person wants to go back to town and open a high-end boutique for the discerning adventurer. I just mean "we all want to defeat this encounter / solve this challenge before us / get out of this situation alive". I'd be pretty surprised if it was regularly the case that the PCs did not share such immediate in-game goals.
I just mean "we all want to defeat this encounter / solve this challenge before us / get out of this situation alive".
Actually, I should probably elaborate on this point. As far as I can tell, your planning goes something like this:
There's nothing wrong with that, but there is at least one alternative:
There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.
One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.
However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]
During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.
This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.
[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees: