> And I totally get why

Why?

Catan is one of my favourite boardgames.

Catan, like Monopoly (or I guess Cricket and Baseball) has am awkward interminable nature to it, especially at high player counts

Long trading discussions are one component of this. The pure randomness of dice meaning that the internal economy can be all messed up for a while also plays into this

There are games with more consistent runtimes that also don’t get bogged down by people with a high chatter:play ratio.

I like hanging out with people to play games but Catan is in that category of game where just one overly annoying person can just make a session totally suck.

I’d rather play something like Carcassonne or some other modern games that involve competition and territorial management like El Grande where I at least have an idea of how long it’ll take.