Since some people are missing the point, I'll try to be clearer.
Making a profit or buying military are not the only goals. For those who play for scores and levels, the skill lies in achieving an optimum balance. While they aren't logged in, the game moves without them and they can't make another change until they have the time to log in again. If they can't log in for a few days and the game has moved on twelve or eighteen months instead of nine then their empires and enterprises will have become more unbalanced. Here's an illustration:
Theoretically, say I am aiming for a GC award and the next level. I suffer a HTE population bubble, or maybe the GMs adjust corp worker balances, and I suddenly get very low on HTEs. My corps become understaffed, I begin to lose money, my FI and Employment index drop, I am heading down a level instead of up, my score is dropping and I might not get an award this month. What do I do? I immediately raise my HTE education priority to compensate. But I have to be quite drastic about it because I am losing HTEs fast.
Unfortunately, RL gets hectic and I'm not able to log in again for 3 days. If the world is moving at 3 months per day, by the time I log back in again my HTEs have just about recovered, but I am now losing medical staff because I sacrificed that education priority to graduate more HTEs. No matter, I can now drop the HTE priority back down again, bring medical staff back to the norm and they will recover. Bingo! I have resolved the difficulty and am back on track.
But if the world moves at 4 or 6 months per day, by the time I log back in again I have a surplus of HTEs and have lost 10 hospitals. Now I have the reverse problem and, if I can't log in again for another few days, it spirals on.
Of course, the optimum would be to log in 3 (or, as some would have it, 4 or 6) times a day, check the progress and adjust by smaller increments. But some players can't do that.
Education priorities are only one example, of course, but a good one for illustration.
And, Josias, if you are referring to me: Firstly, I am not complaining about worker shortages. I am able to manage them very well while the world revolves at three months per day, despite keeping employment above 94%, which is what I need to get to the next level. However, it leaves very little room to deal with sudden imbalances and, if I had the time to regularly raid C3s, I would also have the time to maintain my empire on a faster-spinning world.
Secondly, my point was not about the length of time it takes to IPO. A set of IPOs from a single country takes around a minute and a half. It's the IPO window that's the crucial thing - around 5 mins on GR and around 30 mins on WG. I don't have the time to watch the clock to catch that 5 mins, but I usually manage to hit it on WG.
The main argument doesn't change, however. Those who want a faster world already have a wide choice. Those of us who want a slower world only have WG and, if it is speeded up we will have no choice at all.
Hugs and respect
Jo