Yup. I had this conversation a few days ago with a friend, about cutting out a plotline in my story—it had a cool support character, but when I got to the point of writing that part, I realized that the point wasn’t to send my main on the sidequest, the point was to get her to confront her deadbeat fiancé as soon as possible. If I were a reader, that was what I wanted to read about. So, I slashed away the plotline. In a videogame, sure, I would have wanted it. In a novel, nope, it delayed the midpoint too much.
Also, instead of writing, I put down a few more plot points in the outline for the next book, and I am pretty excited about them.