Maybe this is just me being a grumpy old fart, but I swear so many modern games make the player sit through ages and ages of cutscenes and tutorials before letting us play the damn game.

I miss being able to boot up the game and get stuck right into the meat of the adventure, without having all this tedious red tape getting in the way.

I get that some degree of setup is necessary for a narratively focused game, or to explain the game's mechanics, but for pity's sake, keep it to like 10 minutes or less please, recently a game took me nearly an hour of bullshit before it let me off the leash, and I only get like an hour of game time per day, so that's a whole day's worth of leisure time wasted.

Granted not every game is like this, but it feels like a much more common problem than it should be.

Am I the only one or do others find this frustrating as well?

This was a big issue i had with FF16, feels sometimes like an old woman going on and on and on and on just get the point already. This year I 100% FF16, this and the combat were my two main issues. After I 100% FF16 I purchased the pixel collection this summer during the steam summer sale, and played, 5, 6 and then 4. And it is night and day different in the story telling aspect. FF4-6 (pixel remasters) have a fantastic story, just like 16 does, but gets to the point without hours and hours of bloated story telling.

Any JRPG? I can think Persona 5 takes easily 4 hours before you first get to really explore the first palace. It's a genre that needs you to have some degree of enjoyment in just watching the story as part of the game. Persona in fact makes it slightly more bearable, because it's part social sim, part visual novel game, so you actually get to play the social sim part early before you start dungeon crawling

If talking specifically about long tutorials, then Kingdom Hearts 2. Still an awesome tutorial, it's just not for everyone. It would never work with modern audiences, indeed it quite didn't work at the time it was released

FF16 for me is the opposite. The tutorial is fucking amazing. I've played the demo, and found it 10/10 in story, concept, presentation, gameplay, direction, everything was peak narrative-driven action game 

The issue is when you get to play the actual game. After few hours I noticed how shallow the combat system actually is, I was expecting unlocking new Eikons would change how you approach combat, but this game tries the best it could to not be a RPG. Quest system is extremely boring and formulaic, the game tries to be big when in fact is quite short and linear, map design being as basic as it can be

Story and presentation are still good, except for the endgame

Remember when Kirby Super Star on SNES asked us if it was our first time playing it, and allowing us to skip the Copy mechanic explanation before starting a new game?

More games should do that.

I actually don't mind a slow start to a game at all (though excessive tutorial pop-ups can be a bit annoying), though if it starts to drag on in the later parts that can bother me a bit more.

This is, along with lots of other design changes over the years, a direct result of the growth of the industry. The majority of people who play video games today spend a lot less time so than the average in here. But, I agree, it's incredibly annoying. Kudos to developers who add "skip tutorial" functions to their games. Things like "Alternate start - live another life" for Skyrim was also a huge step in the right direction when it released (it's a mod, one of the most downloaded ones of all time for the game).

I simply refuse to play any game that doesn't get started within a reasonable time (reasonable time is a couple of minutes at most). If you wanna show me a movie, I already have better movies, so no thanks.

Another reason I mostly / exclusively play in VR nowadays. Shorter games, lower budget, less onboarding crap.

I don't mind a good, robust set up and a nice tutorial at the start. I don't play games without stories, so the story is expected. I'm gonna play the game for dozens of hours, so I'll get enough gameplay in the process.
And it's always the same thing when starting a new game. Getting settled, getting in the mood, learning how things work. After the first session you just load up a save and go for it. No big deal.