Going to be a buzzkill here, But there are a few threads on the forums complaining about the length, or at least the event being “time consuming”
I don’t want to call out specific people, but here are some previous forum posts about the length, some are more explicit then others:
All of the posts/threads i listed had some form of disapproval of the length or the time they had to dedicate to bounties.
The problem with a lot of forum posts that complain about issues in the game is it draws more people who agree with that stance to comment, rather then have people argue against it. Most people come on here to state their anger towards something that they want fixed/changed/ or added. Not everyone or every post is like this, but when the devs see most of the players agreeing with a topic or generating a lot of discussion on them, it comes across as something the players want changed, especially if it can be found on multiple threads.
I’m not saying that the way they decide to shorten the bounty was perfect (One of the people suggested the increased auto play), but there were indeed people were stating that the current length was more time consuming then they wanted.