Originally Posted by
Biomega
Many things COULD be done, but the question is more SHOULD they be done.
Personal preference is one thing, but timers also have a protective function. They prevent people from getting stuck in a bad place of sunk cost, where they think they need to finish something for the reward despite it not going well. Nobody wants to spend 3 hours in a failing dungeon where you wipe over and over and people only stick around because there's a reward waiting - a timer gives you an out there, because it sets the limits of how long something should take. And you can still break that limit if you so choose - that's not taken away. It just means that it might not be worth doing for the reward in question, which helps prevent tedious experiences where people would feel obligated to stay well past what they'd ordinarily want to commit to.
Of course they could still just leave; but this isn't about hard limits, it's about creating a sentiment of what is and is not acceptable. And on top of that, it also helps safeguard against degeneracy - e.g. people going into a massively difficult key with absurd setups like 3 tanks 2 healers, grinding out a completion; or the oft-quoted waiting for Bloodlust every pack, etc. You don't want THAT to become an accepted norm, because then people will feel pressured into doing it for rewards.
In addition, timers enforce performance: much like incoming damage requires tanks and healers to perform, timers pressure DPS to put out required numbers and mechanical competency. If you could simply brute-force everything, people would feel no need to improve, and in the long run that hurts everyone. Additionally, it enforces group play that respects each others' time. You're in this for a particular time span, and you have an obligation - enforced by rewards - to make that time count. You can't just randomly afk for 10 minutes and you can't expect people to just carry you, you need to perform. That's not a bad thing, though it does admittedly come with certain negative effects (people leaving at the first problem, for example). Many of those problems can be mitigated by things other than the timer, though.
Without timers, you'd either have to limit rewards (taking away a secondary gearing route) or you'd have to limit difficulty (effectively negating the idea of an open-ended system). Either of which would be a downgrade from what we have now.
M+ has plenty of areas where it could use improvement. But the timer is an integral part of how it works, and for good reason. You can't simply take it away and expect things to suddenly be all fun and games without pressure - because that's not how things worked before M+ either. Nobody wants their time wasted, and nobody wants dungeons to return to meaninglessness in the face of raiding. For that, we really do need things to be timed.
Maybe the solution is to make a compromise, something like having timers not start until M+10 or something. That way more casual players can earn some gear in a more relaxed environment, while everything even remotely competing with raid-level gear would still have to respect a timer.