i think the 4u papers are gradually getting easier and longer each year, i think it would make more sense to make the paper shorter and the questions at the start much harder
however, in making the paper long does help identify people who are good at seeing the "short" method for the first few questions
i remember when i was doing past papers i could never finish all of the last question under the time limit
but if u get up to q8 making some errors along the way you should easily get a hsc mark of 95+