Certain jobs can easily solo full credit on a hunt in the 8-10 seconds. I've been doing this on my SMN since June - and I know DRKs/WARs do that as well. I'm not sure about other jobs.
Despite all of this, either the design of hunts are horrible, or they are being completed in a way that they were not designed for. I believe I read somewhere that Yoshi mentioned how he did not predict hunts to be zerged down the way they were. I submitted a thread not long ago with an idea to prevent the zerg mentality, but it was met with a lot of angst. It seems the general population would prefer to have mindless content with high rewards.
Personally, I find the most interesting part of the hunt to be the prep prior to the hunt. Creating a hunt party and scouting zones. If anything it'd be neat if hunts had some sort of problem solving to pop them. Instead of being on a timer and randomly spawning, you go to a Hunter NPC and chat with them. They can give you a clue about the hunts whereabouts, then you go to that area once solved and find more clues to track down what area of the zone it's in, at which point you perform something to lure it out (using interact-able food or whatever). I think this would add a lot more value to the 'hunt' aspect of it.
I fully agree, this early pull nonsense is just that - nonsense. Everyone seems to think they deserve full credit, even though they put in 0 effort in to finding the hunt. The way I see it, is if you are actively hunting and searching, then yes people should wait long enough for you to get there (3 minutes is roughly the max time needed for this), but if you are just finishing off your A4 run and racing in, and complain that they didn't wait for 10 minutes, then that's ridiculous.
I wish SE would either do something about allowing more people in Linkshells, creating a hunting chat channel, or providing incentive to not zerg it down.