I think this is because they just use analytics very poorly and don’t playtest the game. If you recall, when they came out with that infamous twid that announced those nerfs to power progression and solo ops, they kept going on about activity completion times in the current sandbox and used those to justify the nerfs and timers. Any half-decent data analyst would look deeper into the data to ensure that those averages are not skewed by outliers or other patterns. In this case, I suspect those average completion timers were based a lot by grinders who speed run the activities on repeat, skipping all avoidable combat sections. Since they are farming, their completion times would appear disproportionately much in the data. Since a chunk of the population was grinding like crazy to 450 at the time, I think their data messed ip the average completion times. A clear example is encore. If you want to beat the mission timer at GM level, you have to skip the combat section with the wyverns before the boss encounter, otherwise you run out of time, even if you literally melt all other encounters.