Veterans of the game will continue to play because they already have that time invested. The speed-up is nice to see a faster turnaround on projects but are they looking to keep 1 veteran with a roster of projects cus he throws 18 bucks every 3 months at the game or will they prefer potentially 10 new players potentially throwing money at it? The game has only so many veterans to bleed. New players need to be brought in, and they should be enticed TO stay. The whole thing of "train them for basically a year and then fight with them, then stumble your way around people who have already min-maxed the fighting game to being top players" isn't exactly appealing but it's a true fact of the game. You don't HAVE to play this way, but you wanna at least give them the impression it is a possibility. And speeding things up is a step in the right direction. Might seem unrelated but tangentially, it's actually why Balatro as a game became so popular so quickly. From the beginning with Tetris to Balatro today, the concept of "Number go up = Dopamine" is a real one and seeing your profile's numbers go up = dopamine. It really is that simple sometimes

There’s a couple more of us that play it too.

You are completely correct. But I think the game speed thing was more about keeping the veterans interested than anything to do with new players.

I most definitely don’t believe “speeding” up the game by a minuscule 16.5% is going to attract many more people.  Neither do I think it will effect anyone’s experiences negatively. its a negligible increase 

Then let's formalise those suggestions and pitch them too. Push comes to shove I'm not against relearning some PHP