Length versus density

"That felt short" is usually a complaint about content, not about the clock. Two minutes that respond to three things you actually said in the brief carries more than four minutes that could have been recorded for anyone. The runtime was never really what was being judged.

This is worth separating out because the instinct, on feeling short-changed, is to ask for more time next time. That fixes the wrong variable. What actually drives the sense of a clip being substantial is how much of it is visibly about you specifically - your detail repeated back, your worry addressed by name, your register held rather than a generic one performed - and none of that scales simply with minutes. Memory works the same way. In Fredrickson and Kahneman's 1993 experiments, people's overall evaluations of film clips barely tracked how long the clips ran - the effects of duration "were small" - and followed the intensity of moments within them instead. A judge given nothing to work with can fill four minutes without ever saying anything that could not apply to a stranger, and it will still feel thin. How long a clip typically runs is set mostly by how long a register can be sustained convincingly, which has a natural ceiling well short of most people's assumptions.

The comparison that makes this obvious

Set a two-minute clip against a fixed-length answer from somewhere else and the density point gets sharper. An algorithmic score delivers its full content in the time it takes to load a page, and nobody calls it short, because there was never an expectation of more. A measurement taken with a tape is a single number, arrived at in seconds, and it is complete the instant it exists. Even a scan through a public rating thread delivers whatever it delivers in one read, with no sense that a longer thread would have said more per line.

A commissioned review is the one format built around sustained attention to one person, and that is exactly why its length gets scrutinised in a way none of the alternatives do - length reads as a proxy for how much someone was actually attended to, even when it is the wrong proxy. The better one is straightforward: did the clip say something that could only have been about you. If it did, two minutes rarely feels short. If it did not, ask for one specific thing to be addressed next time rather than for more of the same at greater length - and if you are still comparing the format against an algorithmic score generally, Rate Cock's writeup is the place that comparison is actually made properly.