Riot finally addresses the issue.

"Game Pacing, Snowball etc

Additionally we'll be taking a look at a range of aspects of game pacing during the 8.2 development cycle (game length, snowball, time to kill etc). Uncertain yet if we'll ship changes during 8.2 aimed at that in particular at time of writing. Identifying balance targets is a quicker process, hence the list above, for a topic like this we need to spend more a bit more time however. More on this next week, well aware it's a topic on a lot of people's minds that's not addressed in much detail here. The thing we'll be looking at first is laning phase and whether that's ending too quickly, with corresponding spread of snowballing across lanes." 

5 sentences. This is literally all you needed to quell weeks of rage and discontent on the boards. I bet there's a fair number of people who left the game and wouldn't have if they had gotten literally these 5 short sentences weeks ago.

With that said.

I'm glad this is happening [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]