Yeah, that's exactly it.
More precisely, the major, primary gameplay loop and challenge in the game is time management. You against the calendar.
Which in turn means that any player who wants to "succeed" at the game wants to maximize their time efficiency. Since dungeon visits take up in-game time, that means that you are
incentivized by the core game mechanics to make your dungeon visits as long (and therefore few)
as possible. In other words,
the game mechanics actively reward you for making your own pacing and experience worse.
You can see that in terms of story and a few mechanics, this was not at all the intention. The game's story actually wants you to chip away at the dungeons over a longer time period, which would also result in more interesting and varied pacing.
I see at least two simple ways to overcome this, and neither of them really seem all that hard to implement:
- Make dungeon visits "free" in terms of time. There's a supernatural element there anyway, so story-wise it's not an issue. And it also doesn't really change the challenge in a practical way. It just removes the major incentive for self-made bad pacing.
- Introduce more obstacles in the dungeons which relate back and forth with real-world events. The previous option is more about removing the pull factor making people do extremely long dungeon visits, will this one actively forces them to do more individual ones.