You're trying to railroad the game when the players are telling you very loudly where they want the campaign to go instead. Take them there.
If the NPCs are boring you, that's a different problem. Be sure you're making NPCs that engage you and not just your players. You have to enjoy the game too.
To run an interesting socially-focused game, you might need to learn how to use a few tools.
Challenging situations made from social connections can be made using PC-NPC-PC triangles—but don't intentionally make life-or-death situations out of them unless you want a bloodbath; save life-and-death for external threats to the social group.
In a game with a big stable of NPCs in a complex set of social relationships, maps of the land become far less important than maps of the social situation, and you can use relationship maps (like this one) to keep track of how everyone is connected and feels about each other.
And if, in the end, you don't want at all to play a game that is heavily focused on personal relationships and social interactions, sit down and talk with your players about what kind of game you can all enjoy. Putting a collar around their neck and dragging them toward the plot won't be fun for them or (as you've been learning) for you either.
Make traps that aren't about being hidden, but are about avoiding them.
The latest dungeon I ran included a trap. All along a hallway, there were massive, purple crystal structures growing from the floor to the ceiling. They were immediately obvious to anyone who wasn't literally blind. There were no rolls required, and there was no time searching for the trap because it was obvious.
The trap, however, was that they were triggered by sound. If the characters spoke too loudly or did anything that made noise, they would explode and deal damage to the players, potentially triggering a chain reaction that could easily kill them.
This turned the characters away from having to do Perception checks every five feet, and instead made it interactive and a roleplay opportunity. How were they going to communicate? How were they going to get the plate wearing orc across? What was even on the other side, was it worth it at all?
All in all, it took them 20 minutes of planning, but rather than it being 20 minutes of "I roll Perception, what do I see?" it was 20 minutes of them chatting in character and planning their course of action, and they loved it. They got to flex their roleplay muscles rather than roll dice, and they got to plan something more clever than "I roll to disarm the trap".
Make it a time investment.
But perhaps you really like hidden traps, and you think you have a particularly good one that you don't want to get rid of. No problem. A character who is constantly searching for traps is going to be wasting a lot of time. This is time that could be better spent hunting down an enemy, exploring the rest of the dungeon, completing their quests, or even resting. They can't do any of those things while they are constantly scouring every square of a dungeon for traps. So, introduce something that puts a time constraint on them.
Perhaps they know their target will be leaving soon, and wasting hours searching for traps means their target escapes.
Maybe a spell is going to cause the entrance to the dungeon to shut in three hours, sealing them in to starve to death, and they need to be quick.
It could even be something as simple as the person who gave them the quest is very picky about time, and won't be in town to pay them for completing their quest if they take longer than a few hours.
If you don't want to do something so strict, you can still punish extreme amounts of time spent searching for traps. Enemies perhaps will know they are outside the door, and the longer they spend searching, the more reinforcements that arrive or the better position they are in to ambush the players as they enter. Maybe enemies have time to sneak up and surprise the players as they waste an hour with their eyes to the floor looking for traps that aren't there.
If you are concerned about the out of game time being spent...
Perhaps your problem is not with the time being wasted in game, but rather out of game. If so, that's easily fixed: just have them roll one Perception check per room or section, rather than every hall and every door.
Best Answer
I read a passage in the DMG the other night that without having the book at hand I think I can roughly paraphrase as
So you simply don't allow insight to be a lie detector test, you let them find the personality of the individual they are talking to and decide for themselves if the person is trustworthy and if they can use those features to convince themselves.
You also make all conversations grow organically, when they reach a suitable point to ask for an insight check you can allow them, but they can't have insight if they don't engage in meaningful conversation.
Example:
The PC's chat to the mayor and ask him about something they know. You roleplay the mayor as a liar and say something like "The mayor looks away from you for a second before replying with [wrong answer here]". This is the clue for the PC to ask for an insight check which will reveal the flaw. They now know they are dealing with a liar and have to find a way to get the truth.
You know the only way to get that truth is to threaten the Kangaroo, so the PC's have to do something to either ask about the Kangaroo and insight check the relevance, or see the huge painting of the mayor and his kangaroo frolicking in the pastures and deduce it for themselves.
This relies on you giving more depth to the NPCs however and properly roleplaying them according to those characteristics. How hard this is I couldn't tell you.
TL/DR:
Insight isn't a lie detector, it is a clue to the personality of the NPC which will allow them to deduce for themselves. If the NPC has no personality it is hard to do and almost has to be a lie detector test which is where the bad habit comes from.