Every flying organisation I've been into (though admittedly a small sample uk side), have an 'office copy' of the days weather and notams printed out and left in a public place where one can pick up and read. (though I do seem to recall UK notams being in a rather unhelpful lat-long notation, rather than related to significant points on the map)
Reading NOTAMs or not doesn't prevent CAS busts (unless CAS was extended by NOTAM) but it would prevent TRA busts and similar. But I have found that on a typical cross-country (or cross-multiple-countries) VFR flight even a rather clever narrow route briefing might easily give you half a dozen pages of NOTAMs. Because of the old telex format, in all caps, filled with abbreviations and more importantly, filled with placenames you don't recognize (particularly if foreign country) and coordinates you can't place.
So yes I tend to read through the whole bunch but if you want to fly at some point in time that day, you have to do a bit of mental filtering, and then still it may take far too long.
What I don't get is why Eurocontrol, who already collect all NOTAMs for Europe, can't extend their NOTAM briefing application (EAD Basic) to include a graphical/clickable overview of NOTAMs. That would make checking NOTAMs a two-minute job.
Amongst them we had a T tail twin which ploughed it's way through the box
Another tendency I have noticed in some fellow pilots is that if they acquire an aviation GPS, they tend to use that for flight planning as well. They are a marvelous piece of kit for that, much faster than the map/flight computer thing to plot your route. But the problem is that the only abundant suitable waypoints that the GPS and the map have in common are the airfields. So a lot of flights are planned via the overheads of airfields. Not good. Maybe it's time for some IFR-like intersections to be introduced for VFR flight, at locations that are easily recognizable from the air, are listed on the map and are included in the GPS database.