Completely agree with everything except the notion of a timed quest. Maybe for certain quests having it be time-based for a part of it... but to arbitrarily limit the time for a quest seems kinda unfair.

Hopefully this is the kind of thing we will be getting soon. Yoshi-P did say that starting with 1.21 there will be fewer quests being added, but each quest would start becoming a lot more involved and story driven. Here's hoping that is the case.