My attention span nowadays in raids is pretty terrible. If fights are currently designed to be that long that’s more reason I don’t belong there. 
The entire Sylvanas fight, except the final phase, is a glorified cut-scene or a quick-time event. It is probably my least favorite encounter in any game ever, and if they ever do another fight on that scale of terrible I will almost certainly quit raiding on the spot.
Make it a short one but introduce randomness. Currently you can map the whole fight and you know at every point in it, what the boss will do. Shuffle the mechanics and introduce randomness in each pull. Let the bosses learn too, according to the group. Make players question what will come next.
God That fight being so annoyingly long is why I didn’t get the lego bow. I just couldn’t stand doing it… Pugs spending an hour to finally make it to the last stage and wipe at 2-5% because of stupid.
I was burnt out xD
This. It’s horrible in FFXIV, it’s horrible here, it’s horrible everywhere.
Even the coolest fight with the best thematics (Looking at you unreal Thordan) isn’t fun when it takes 10 minutes just to get back to your progression part of the fight.
If any fight can be lusted twice, it needs to be revisited.
6mins 30s is the ideal fight duration for “hard fights”. 2x 3min cds, 3x 2min cds, etc. Make you feel like your final CD wave push to the end of the fight was meaningful and impactful.
I was always of the opinion that they should have split Sylvanas up into two fights. Have phases 1 and 2 be the penultimate boss kind of like Deathwing’s Spine. (Call it Domination’s Ascent or something like that). And have the area where phase 3 takes place be the final fight against Sylvanas.
Sylvanas 
“You failed on the platforms, now do the long phase 1 and 2 bullcrap again! What fun!”
one of the many reasons I took a break between Sanctum and Dragonflight pre-patch
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Made my OP last night in frustration after another night of not killing mythic Silken Court 
Having to get 6-7 minutes into the fight just to be like “ok now we can start to learn this phase” is really really tedious.
N’zoth was epic and that took like 10 to 20 minutes on LFR depending on the team. I miss N’zoth…
I remember doing Yogg in Ulduar in Wrath, and it was around 10-15 minutes each attempt, getting faster with time.
I think the final bosses should be longer, and the average encounter should ideally be anywhere from 2 minutes to like 8 minutes.
Straightforward bosses like Patchwerk shouldn’t be too long of encounters.
There are good long encounters just like there are bad short encounters. And vice versa. Encounter length doesn’t particularly dictate quality; flow and mechanics do.
Case in point, sha of fear. Almost ten minutes of tossing a ball around, occasionally avoiding waterspouts and killing periodic adds. The length of the last phase combined with the monotony of the mechanic structure made it tedious, awkward and uninteresting. If they had made the last phase about 1/3 as long as it was, but significantly ramped up the pressure (ex: can only hold ball once, more adds coming out faster), it would have been a much better fight.
There are also many good encounters that run a little longer. Garrosh (though the first two phases felt a bit long in the tooth), Argus, Ragnaros with Legs.
There are many less final bosses with short lengths, Sarkareth is the only one that immediately comes to mind. The problem there is that 2020’s devs think that end bosses have to have a small novels worth of mechanics to be ‘good’, and on a short boss fight that means something has to happen every 3-5 seconds. But past that, shorter doesn’t equal better. Champions of the Light from BFA was one of the shortest raid encounters ever, and also one of the worst ever. There’s nuance.
I for one actually loved Flame Leviathan fight with vehicles.
I think the length of the fight matters less than how much the fight changes.
6 minutes of essentially the same phase can get old. 10 minutes of essentially the same phase definitely gets old (We’ve seen this before). But if it’s a 6-7 minute fight with 2 or 3 distinct phases, I don’t really have a problem with that in terms of the length of the fight in a vacuum.
From a prog standpoint it’s frustrating when the “hard” part is in a final phase or something though. I’d almost rather the game let you start the fight at Phase Checkpoints sometimes, but I understand that’d drastically reduce the difficulty in most cases and probably isn’t worth looking into outside of fringe cases like Sha of Fear back in MoP.
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I would aim for 5min fights for non final boss fights. I think they should also have less abilities per phase but more phases or more dynamic phases.
Right now its dodge this attack, stack on that attack, run away on that one. Thats the whole phase that you fight for X mins then you do the next phase which is the same except the abilities look different.
I loved Flame Leviathan, everyone had something to do during the fight that wasn’t just shoot colors at it or stab it.
It wasn’t until BfA when I raided with a guild a bit during that time I realized progging raid bosses just isn’t fun to me.
Now I’m thinking about the final boss in Monster Hunter Iceborne. I had to fight that thing alone and I barely got it in time because the fight has a time limit. It was just over 40 minutes of dodging and screaming.
Edit: I meant Shara Ishvalda. Not Fatalis.