If I love a game, I want it to be long so I can enjoy it longer. FF7 Rebirth is very long if you do absolutely everything, and still I did not want it to end. And if a game is not your kind of thing, you will not be playing it in the first place.
Also, you can always cut the fat yourself by ignoring side content and only focusing on the main story. If you do that, most games are really not as long as you might think they are. It's always funny how people complain about content that is not mandatory to finish the game.
Many people enjoy games that actually have no end and you can go on forever. Doesn't seem to bother them. And there are always shorter games out there if that is somehow valuable to you.
I see no upside in making games shorter just to make them shorter. You know it's not going to affect the price, they are going to charge the same. So you will get less for the same price and stunted stories, yay.

I disagree with your last statement. Stunted stories come from bloat imo. In The Witcher 3 I had completely lost track of the main story due to all the (excellent) side quests. I was not engaged with the main story at all anymore by the end and kinda forced myself to finish it. The same with the main story in Skyrim. The main story becomes the least enjoyable part of those games. Same again with RDR2, Death Stranding.

Shorter games are much better at telling stories.

Shorter games don't make them cheaper, it makes the experience higher quality though. Release shenanigans aside, CP2077 vs NMS, which is the higher quality experience with better story...

I loved FF7 at the time, but not interested in a longer version, rather a shorter one. So staying away from the remake.

You misunderstand the problem. I was enjoying FF7 Rebirths side content until yet another mini game popped up and it sucks to be on those side storyline paths only to hit a wall like that. After I quit the side stuff, like you said I cut the fat myself, I found the main path dragged without the side content to break it up and wad filled with many shitty techniques to extend gameplay. 

I think we need to agree that "respecting your time" really means something different depending on who is playing.  A list of 100 shitty side quests respects my time a lot less than full game overs, trial and error, and grinding.  I'm sure others would disagree.

Exactly! I'm one who doesn't necessarily appreciate trial and error, depending on how exactly it's done. I love Sekiro, but for me (my skill level?), some of the boss fights were just trial and error, over and over again... Well, all of them, really, must some of them did start to feel like they didn't respect my time either, especially due to the new moves that could sometimes come up only after a very large number of tries.

Most long games are full of filler I find.

Give me a lean mean 5-15 hour game with no fat over a bloated 100 hour game any day.

Yes. Too many single-player games suffer from unnecessary bloat as they've grown in scale & scope.

While actually doing so was a skill issue because of the difficulty of many games back then, it was usually the case that most games back in the 8-bit & 16-bit days could be beaten in a single sitting. It makes sense, since most games lacked the ability to save data (though some had battery backup) and memory cards weren't a thing yet, so devs had to make games that players could beat in 2-3 hours tops. The few games that did have battery backup to allow for save data were typically games meant to be long, like JRPGs. Some of those did have problems with bloat in the form of level grinding, but that was arguably a necessity because of how small the game worlds were (you could breeze through the original Dragon Quest in a couple of hours tops if you could start at max level). By the 16-bit era, enforced level grinding fell by the wayside; I was able to progress through Final Fantasy IV without having to grind, yet the game still took like 40 hours.

But as games moved to 3D and the ability to save progress became the norm, games have gotten bigger and bigger. Long games stopped being the sole purview of JRPGs. Now everybody wanted to tell some grand story. In a medium that's desperate to prove itself to older entertainment media, video games constantly sought to make ever more epic adventures with larger game worlds. Games that took 8-10 hours became commonplace. Then open-world games became a thing, with maps growing and growing over time, and more and more games started to take 20, 30, 40 hours or more. Developers had to fill these increasingly large maps with various tasks for players to accomplish to justify a map that big. Sadly, so much of that involves a bunch of repetitive checklist objectives, and even when devs actually try to come up with a good variety of things to do, there's still a lot of repetition because there's only so many unique things to do.

Sadly, gamers are partly to blame as well. "Short" became a dirty word at some point, along with "linear." Many of them boiled the value of a single-player game down to a "price divided by hours to beat" metric (which I think is overly simplistic bullshit, because it ignores a lot of other things, including replay value) and have demanded games that take a ludicrous amount of time to 100%.

Honestly, I'd like to see the return of the "AA" game, something that fills the gap between the massive Triple-A games and indie titles. With film there's a wide variety of budgets and crew sizes, not just "mega blockbuster" and "small indie film" with no in-between. Why not have that be the case in video games as well? We need more shorter games of high quality that I could reasonably beat in just a few hours tops. Single-player-only FPS campaigns closer in scale to the the original Halo. Survival horror games of the scale of the PS1 Resident Evil games (RE3 Remake kinda fits this). 2D platformers the scale of classic 2D Mario or Mega Man. Shoot-em-ups like Gradius & R-Type. I'd be willing to spend full price on such games, though $40 would be a better compromise because of general perceptions of cost/time-to-beat.

I agree, but the problem is your last sentence.

These shorter games were never $40, they were full price games. You're doing the same you accuse gamers of for the trend to bloated games. "price divided by hours to beat"

With the perception that shorter games should be lower price, you end up with the same problems, just in shorter games. That's what's happening in VR atm, 'story' games are $30 / $40, around 8 hours to beat, full of artificial padding. Recently released Metro Awakening, Behemoth, Alien Rogue Incursion all guilty of padding / repetition to make that 8 hour mark.

Portal was full price, time to beat 3 hours. It was perfect! Great to replay.

Ikaruga was full price, 5 hours. Why should these games be cheaper now?

If devs want to add more content and make the game longer (in the actual game and not DLC) than I'm all for it, as I'm sure we all want to get our money's worth. And if that's the case then it seems they respect our money?

I find the real issue is just me trying to control myself and whether I keep to the main story or go off track. This is especially difficult with open world games. With Zelda BOTY I put in +100hrs before getting to the 2nd shrine XD

Alan wake is another that doesn't respect time, there is no reason the mind Palace boars can't auto update and it does it at certain points anyway. Just another cheap easy form of content taking their dev work in and repurposing it as gameplay all to extend length. OG Alan Wake was rhe perfect length. According to hltb this is 20 hours, Idk why they seen the need to pad it out that long but I can't make judgments just yet.