It seems to me that if one becomes a professor, a very big chunk of one's time goes into writing grant applications. All of that is "wasted time", in the sense that it takes time away from the primary goal of making good research. In the private sector one would hire separate people to perform this kind of support functions, but in academia that is often impossible. For these reasons, even being able to synthesize known information efficiently would be a very useful skill in this line of work.