Maxing all your confidants on the first try is impressive, did you use a guide? I pretty much did everything blind for better or worse. The only things I looked at were a gift guide dungeon guides for a couple of them because I was tired of the puzzles. Maybe the not knowing what to do added more time.
I didn't follow a guide, but I also didn't go in completely blind
I heard people talking about how useful the
confidant was for time management and that you couldn't raise
confidant past level 4 until a specific party member joined. Knowing that bit of information I prioritized
ASAP and didn't spend more time than needed with the latter. Towards the end I almost thought I wouldn't make it because of the Tower arcana but I managed to do it with around a week to spare. It felt like big accomplishment for me since I didn't even come close to maxing everybody in P3 and P4.
I actually didn't really have any problems with the pacing, personally. I wouldn't really want them to remove anything. I actually enjoyed the more boss heavy sections.
I think P5 has simultaneously pretty good and pretty bad pacing. If I had to put it into words, I think the "macro-pacing", i.e. how often the game advances the main plot, is actually handled pretty well for the most part. You always feel like you're moving forwards at a reasonable pace (Summer aside) and story events/plot beats are fairly well spaced. On the other hand, the "micro-pacing", i.e. your daily activities and sometimes even dialogue scenes, feel a bit more padded than usual. Constant text messages (some are actually good, but many are downright unnecessary), repeated dialogue, dialogue that repeats itself, dialogue that says the same thing to reinforce an idea, and a few other issues. There's also the "story-time"/"activity-time" dichotomy that so many people have complained about, something that could've easily been addressed by just letting you do something at night when nothing particularly important happens in a "story day". They're small issues overall, but in the course of 100~200 hours of playtime it adds up and can become quite grating, specially on a first playthrough, which is when you don't want to skip anything in fear of missing something important. Fixing these annoyances would make the game feel a bit faster.
Then there are those who just aren't that invested in the story events in a particular section of the game. Pacing is going to feel sluggish if you're not into what's happening in the plot. Fixing that is a little more complicated, but making the villains more compelling and exploring their themes in a more in-depth manner would be a great start.
