Speeding up the opening ladder by a few moves makes sense when you have a game of standard openings and repeated common plays. We all know how this is going to go, so we can just skip over it. I understand why grandmaster chess players would want that. But if you're looking at the board and just trying to plan ahead, and actually having to think about planning because you haven't memorized by rote all the openings, I think you can understand why that rule would seem arbitrary and absurd to a new player.

For most of the history of the game, chess was a board game you could pull out and just play, and you couldn't have standardized openings, because everyone played with a different ruleset, and that would make the game behave differently, which meant that you always had to think about it. Once chess was standardized, it was standardized in such a way as to accommodate tournament play, and that can be to the detriment of just playing it as a game.

People imagine chess skill as essentially a direct proxy for overall intelligence, perhaps moreso than any other game. But in reality, I think that modern chess has much less intellectual value than it once did. Because the standardization of the game has allowed more of the game to be dominated by rote memorization of specific plays, and the very niche rules that only make sense in the context of very specific conditions created by the very specific rules in use are just a symptom of that.

If it were up to me, chess sets would come with an additional set of fairy pieces in addition to the standard set, and in tournaments, you would have a randomized selection process that would determine what pieces you start with (probably the same for both sides; it would be interesting to play asymmetric games but would require a lot of additional restrictions to keep a balance of equal value pieces). Under those conditions, you would have to actually play the game, and not just work down a ladder of standardized responses, and that would make it unnecessary to introduce rules like en passante and the double pawn move to speed up the game, because you wouldn't just be trying to skip over the boring part, you would be making real and meaningful decisions the whole time.