Ruby lights are irrelevant if the group has enough competent members to kill quickly. Even if you're allergic to math, it's not hard to figure out that killing twice as faster produces twice as many chests. Ruby light also leads to Gold, Silver, and Ebon lights, which lead to more experience and cruor.

If you're timing out, the answer is to be more awesome and kill more stuff. Not to yell at the one or two bros or bro-ettes who are actually performing well and killing things at a good pace.

Ideally, an 18 person alliance will be all over the place and working on between two and a half-dozen monsters at once. So, yeah, this usually means the strongest melee are engaging monsters by their lonesome self. This is hard to do when using the books, so I actually prefer Scars areas. I'm not sure if it's more or less experience, but there's far less tedium and there's far more actual combat.