Players avoiding the fun bits
I have a great group of players. They each have different focuses on what they want out of a game, but they work well together and have fun doing what the others want to see, so there aren't conflicts.
But they have started to get into what I think of as an annoying habit, which is to basically avoid a lot of content. It's been a while since I was a player, but when I was, we'd try to engage with what the DM had set up as much as possible. If there was a dungeon, we'd attempt to explore every corner of the dungeon, because there could be a hidden treasure room, or a cool monster to fight, or an NPC to interact with and find more stuff to do.
My current group doesn't. They attempt to use things like passwall to bypass large chunks of stuff so they get directly to the end of the setup. They want to teleport back to home base every day, so they never end up in an inn or a tavern where they can meet NPCs and we can have that interaction to get them information about their current quest. Four sessions back, they were at a place where they could either travel through a forest, or travel through an underground cave system. They ended the session in the mouth of the cave system, and I asked them if they were going through the caves. One immediately said yes, one of the others then said, "Yeah, that's probably the best way", they all nodded and left. I prepped for everything in the cave system, they came back and decided to fly over the forest, leaving me scrambling to improv the stuff at the other end that I didn't expect for several sessions.
Now, if this was just the way the group is, then I'd roll with it and make the campaign fit what they want to play. But this is also the group that says they love my NPCs, and have on several occasions attempted to get them permanently part of their group. When there was a situation where I created a very linear dungeon so they basically had to go through it all, they loved it and talked about how cool it was. But if I don't force them to go through it that way, they bypass everything they can to get to the end.
We've been doing this campaign for a while, and I would normally assume they were looking to get through it to end the campaign, but they aren't even doing that. I've made it clear the in world dates when the major milestones will happen to finish the campaign, and made it clear that if they take some downtime we'll get there a lot faster, but they never want a day in world to pass where they are not doing something. They don't even travel overland anymore so I can burn some time that way, it's all teleporting.
What do you do in this situation? Make everything linear so they have to go through it all? Stop creating so much stuff and assume they will bypass it? Quantum ogres everywhere?