https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...96P4s/htmlview
BCOB (T5) took 65 days and was primarily gated as long as it was by Twister being broken/badly tuned. Complaints almost invariably centred around this problem.
SCOB (T9) took 19 days and was mildly gear gated (It was just a huge difficulty step up over anything else at the time). I honestly don't remember seeing any complaints over T9 tbh.
FCOB (T13) took 5 days and wasn't at all gear gated. The only complaints here were that it was disappointingly easy for what was meant to be a grand finale.
Gordias (A4S) took 34 days, it wasn't gear gated, but was rather jank/strat/latency gated
as was later confirmed when a Chinese team killed it 4 days after release in ilvl 190 (aka normal mode) gear but with the luxury of fleshed out strats and regional servers. Gordias complaints will go down in history but this was rooted in terrible development, tuning and testing decisions rather than raw gear gating.
Midas (A8S) took 17 days and was similar to T9 in that it was mildly gear gated but was also yet another major step up in complexity. The main complaints that I can remember were primarily down to how PF unfriendly A6S was. I don't remember A8S getting much if any flak at all tbh. My only nit pick was that it was a bit long but outside of that, it was an instant classic.
Creator (A12S) took 2 days and wasn't at all gear gated. Complaints were that if anything, it was quite significantly undertuned and disappointingly easy, even more so than T13.
The community didn't seem to have a problem with it back then. I do actually agree with you though, in the sense that I suspect people wouldn't be happy with new raid tiers taking more than a day to be back on farm status. But that's primarily because the raids aren't really fun anymore, at least not like they used to be.