" The key takeaway was that the game was too long"
....

I'm currently mid way through a heavily modded game which is sitting at about 15 days playtime.

we decided that building ghosts/blueprints from the map is an amazing feature.
That's actually bad :( Yes, it's indeed powerful feature. Overpowered, I'd say.
Here is dilemma: as I told before, this kills personal presence factor, but not to use it will be just wastfull, thus silly.

I'm actually ...