The fact of the matter is that game development has become very expensive and time consuming. We're waiting 5+ years for the next game from many developers and, to add insult to injury, the amount of sales needed to recoup those costs is insane.
Publishers are concerned about costs and have indeed "read the market", believing the answer is to raise prices - which many gamers object to. Yet, as the thread indicates, some gamers also object to them taking any measures to keep the lid on costs. Some also object to tactics like season passes, micro transactions, loot crates etc etc. We are going to have to pick our poison at some point.
"Make shorter games" is itself a shorthand statement of wanting a more austere development process. When you look at the visuals on display nowadays, it is astounding, but people (both gamers and I guess developer's themselves) want the pond to grow larger as well as deeper. It's not like we're still playing games the size of GTA III except massively more detailed - now the expectation is to also have a whole state to explore, and I bet soon a small country. Obviously this is a simplification, and the case can be made for a few games to go wild with scale and ambition. But for a lot of other games going bigger simply feels like a waste of effort.
Huge budgets and development times also blur the margins between success and failure, which naturally creates a development environment where less risks are taken. I'd never expect a $200-300 million dollar game to take huge risks, that isn't what i'm asking for, but right now it feels like we are at the opposite end of the spectrum where the big AAA releases are playing it too safe.
This also ties into the issue that most people simply do not finish games. You could say that development costs for most of the content is therefore being devoted to a minority of people, which is a waste in my eyes. I suspect the phenomena of not finishing games is, aside from the obscene time investment, also because many of these games just become far too boring to hold people's attention for 50+ hours.
It's easy to say "length isn't the problem, developers gotta make better games to keep your attention", which on face value sounds like it makes sense - but that risk averse nature of huge projects means this is less and less likely to actually happen.
As a thought experiment, if you were to give me the choice between:
a) a 50+ hour, huge open world game, which plays it safe because it really cannot fail and takes 5-6 years to make, for $70 (*soon probably $80)
b) a 25 hour, smaller scale game (can still even be open world!), which maybe takes more risks and around 3-4 years to make, for $60
I'd choose the latter every day of the week simply because it would be more interesting and you'd get a higher number of ideas put into motion.