As a casual player, while I never ever had a particular problem with duels being excessively long, I can really only agree with Gibby's sentiment that
it’s only a matter of time until someone wants to win a tournament match so much that they....create a horribly boring defensive meta
Duels definitely shouldn't be as long as they were in WB.
But right now, I'd rather take the horribly-defensive meta of blocking for 35 minutes than for duels to instead be running around the duel arena staying out of range and kiting the enemy for 35 minutes, like it's the goddamn pre-duel footsies from WB but for the twenty seconds you're playing before you throw the duel and quit the game, you're fighting a chronic s-keyer.
While both options are ****, at least I can actually ****ing play the goddamn game if I have the ability to block an attack, and for a casual player like me, whose average enemy and ally will never have the consistency to block attacks without screwing up for like a minute tops in WB, "playing to win" is actually "playing the game" in WB, and giving yourself over to what should've been Bannerlord's core gameplay experience of tempo-based combat, instead of whatever the **** it is right now. While I can't make an opinion for the pros, I can definitely say that a player like me had no issue with the length of duels, but I can see the pros getting extremely frustrated with it.
Dueling in Bannerlord for me is a question of whether I want to play a bad clone of Warband (go all in, play tempo, duel ends in like five seconds because the feints are unreadable and none of us can block), or whether I want to play to win, which actually means to play the pre-duel Warband footsies for all eternity every time I start a duel (which seems to me is the exact same thing as the first option, except there's about a minute of staring at each other out of range and pressing movement buttons). That's basically just my surface level casual experience about it, but
that experience should be important too, which is why I argue for blocking to be better.
But again, I iterate that both options are ****. One is **** for highly skilled players, but the second option is dog**** for almost all players.