Hey, a fun thought experiment I learned to do some time back. Every time you want to say "I don't get this" or "I don't understand" about someone else and you barrel on to suggest something else, what you're really saying is "I have an empathy deficit." Try ever so slightly harder to put yourself in another person's shoes.
See, in part, what Hurlshot says below:
I can still read books by squeezing in a few pages (I've been working my way through a big economics text five minutes at a time in the mornings in between my breakfast and the kids waking up), or by reading them during the commute, or via audiobook. But yes, kids and a day job means I don't read as much anymore, either. I also don't go to the gym as much anymore either (though I still try). Side note: in the US (where most people have to drive around), how many skinny/fit parents of multiple young children do you see wandering around? Kids are tiring without even being good exercise! It's even an effort just to find the time to find and listen to new music: now I know why parents become increasingly "uncool" over time; staying up to date on stuff is time-consuming and sometimes it's just not worth it (my wife has basically given up on finding new music to listen to).
For gaming in particular (versus reading a book), there's overhead in gaming, and I want to feel like I "accomplished something" for the hour or two that I can squirrel away in an evening (and 15 minutes is a non-starter because of such overhead). This has meant, in practice, that I play more shooters and action games these days, because I can spin it up real quickly, kill a hundred nazis or zombies or whatnot in like half an hour, and feel like I did something with my rare free time. However much I love Deadfire and games like it, it can be a slog because over like an hour of gameplay, a significant chunk of that will be in load/save menus[1], staring at inventory screens and character screens, wandering through vast empty wilderness areas, and basically not any what I would consider the actual "game" part of the game (questing, dialogue, story, combat). An RPG that is very compact and dense like TOW means there's not a lot of wasted wandering and I spend more time doing the actual game and accomplishing quests, and the mechanics are simple enough that I don't have to spend time during my free time trying to look up stuff or staring at dense info screens trying to determine my next steps - it's optimized to be rich over 15-20 hours which also means I see a lot of progress in story lines and character development in any given chunk of time. (During my game times, I literally set up intermittent timers so I don't lose track of time and forget to go to sleep or something, and I can definitively say that with a 30 minute timer I might be able to clear multiple areas in TOW, but meanwhile literally not even finish a single fight in Deadfire.)
[1] this is despite Deadfire having pretty speedy load times in general; meanwhile I literally don't want to play PoE1 anymore because of its buggy load times (they get longer and longer hte further you are in the game) means it would just be a huge waste of my free time to play
I'm not saying that companies must make short and simple RPGs - I still enjoy getting through Generic Bethesda Open World(tm) game, and games like Deadfire, but merely that I appreciate it when there exist short games. Like I said before, my own critique of TOW is that the Tyranny approach made reactivity such a deep-cut that it was a short game with a long shelf-life because you would literally have areas shut off from you from one run to the next, so even if one run took 15-20 hours the game's actual life with a person might be multiples of that, whereas I could easily see in games like Deadfire or TOW (with a more modest amount of reactivity) that you could be one and done and it could be more problematic as a value proposition for some people.