So BungiVision can say to the shareholders that the average player time is x, when in actual fact if you skip the cutscenes; it would be a lot less. I'm probably way of base with that. It should be that on your first play through of any given story mode/strike loading screen you can't skip, but subsequent play through the skip button is enabled - though, this would mean each character you create you would have to go through each cutscene once.