I just don't see any reason to waste players time by forcing them to go through all the trivial stages in survival. Haven't played enough Extreme so can't say where that actually gets challenging but atleast with Hard the difficulty comes around stage 40. Getting to that point still takes around 15-20 minutes which is just way too much time IMO. Having way less stages would still keep it hard but it wouldn't feel like a chore since you don't have to spend ton of time with going through the stages.
And you have pretty much foolproof strategies to beat the AI for early stages but at later stages they don't work so well anymore. So why not just cut the stages that you can easily cheese through and leave the ones where you need to think even little bit.
Well, the reason why it's both very difficult and absurdly long is because a ton of FM is gated behind that mode. So much FM, in fact, I'm sure 99.9% of the playerbase was never meant to unlock it yet they shoved so much there that *theoretically* you could buy every DLC character ever released with FM by clearing Survival with all characters on all difficulties. The business model Capcom has chosen for SFV sounds pretty great if all you knew about it was that there's enough FM to be earned just in single player to unlock every character, Stage, and story costume for Season 1.
The Survival mode isn't hard like, say, a particularly tough Dark Souls boss is hard where you just have to learn how to beat it through trial and error. Even employing AI cheesing tactics it's essentially random if the game is going to allow you to win or not. The only real deterrent is that the player is investing an hour of their time to roll the dice.
So I don't see Survival becoming much shorter without the FM being drastically reduced.
