Seriously 3-5 minute repop on NMs?

[Abriael]

The point is that it takes an awful lot longer for it to become routine.

Nope. It's still a routine. A routine is simply an activity doing regularly. 2 days or 2 hours doesn't make a difference.

I'm not advocating that at all. Having an NM pop during a 30 minute window does not reduce accessibility for those who do not have a lot of time on their hands.

Of course it does. It's an extremely predictable spawn time, and turns the camp in an overcamped mess, meaning that people will very rarely even get a shot at the mob, bahving to wait another 30 minutes, then another 30, then another 30 and so forth. It's most definitely not "only" 30 minutes.

Ah, so we're playing word games. In that case, 'too infrequently' is equally arbitrary.

Luckily, the definition of a timesink is not.

You are still discounting the fact that many people enjoy the scarcity of these NMs. You don't enjoy that aspect, which is fine, but it is pointless vilifying those who do.

"Many"? Rather elastic definition of a vast minority of vocal elitists. Let's not pull people by the nose. Most of those enjoy keeping other people out of that "exclusive club", not the "scarcity" of the NM. There are quite a few example in this very thread.

All spawns are going to be predictable to some extent. There is no getting away from that.

There's getting away from that. It's exactly what we have now with very short timers. The timer is short, so people don't feel compelled to be there at every repop, and the number of people camping the same mob at the same time gets diluted considerably. In addition to that, people are encouraged to team up instead of competing with every other goon in sight, which is very conductive to a good community.
As it's exactly happening with the new NMs in FFXIV, mind you.