ah, this entire "all or nothing" attitude is horrible. So the only solution you guys managed to find was to draw shitty red lines of where stuff is either "too long to have an beginner difficulty at all" or "not long enough so map a full beginner difficulty".
I'd like to repeat what I repeated on other places already, but please somebody explain me why you guys think that "all or nothing" is the only approach that you actually were able to go with?
You say "Hey, look, we get it, mapping a 5 minutes Easy is awful and boring to everybody, it's stale and uninteresting" and then you deduct "SO DON'T MAKE THEM AT ALL!" instead of "Make an Easy that has a 1 minute of drain time, that's enough!"
It doesn't make sense. Sure, for some shitty reason or another, making beatmap sets with varying drain times between difficulties is frowned upon to heavens. (I don't know why, but ok). Also there is this one rule that prohibits you to use less than 80% of the song or something. Fair enough, but why must this be adhered to in all difficulties? Why does the rule not say "If you never use more than 80% of the song in any of the difficulties, then you can't rank it, because you should cut the song, since you never use a huge chunk of the song in any of your difficulties, but if you use 80%+ of the song in at least one or two or whatever amount of difficulites and you can do whatever length on the easier ones, then be my guest".
What I am proposing instead is to keep beginner difficulties mandatory as prior the change and as we are used to it, however, allow people to map easier difficulties of shorter drain time, so they keep getting created for beginners to enjoy, but still don't make mappers vomit the same copypaste pattern into a 5 minute map, where even the untrained monkey from the basement would fall asleep at playing it.