Reduced mash times

Brew Your Own magazine (article not web published) recently printed an article about reduced mashing times. A rude summary is that today's highly modified malts really don't need the extended mashing periods that lesser modified malts of previous generations required. I've heard many people say the vast majority of starch conversion takes place in the first 20 minutes. I'm sure this could be charted by periodic gravity testing over a mash cycle, but that's an experiment I'm not really interested in conducting. Last weekend I brewed an American wheat. I doughed-in, raised my mash temp to 152 degrees and rested for 35 minutes (45 total including the 10 minute dough-in and temperature step). I recirculate constantly through my mash, so no need to vorlauf. At 45 minutes I started the sparge (around 30 minutes for 7 gallons pre-boil). I ended up with an OG of 1.048, with my target being 1.049. A difference of .001 is within my range of tolerance, particularly when efficiency is around 76%. Conclusions? Nothing concrete, that is for certain, but I can say that reducing my overall mash time by 25% had no ill effects on gravity.