One thing you have to realize in the fallacy of your statememt, "What's the deal with the long fermentation times??" is that we're not talking about talking about
fermentation times fermentation time is over when it's over, and that is generally a week or so, though with higher grav beers it will take longer. What we're talking is conditioning time, letting the yeast clean up the by products of fermentation which leads to off flavor, and letting our beer clear.
Many of us have found that longer time on the yeast leads to clearer, crisper and better tasting beer, with little or no sediment in the bottle.
This is my yeastcake for my Sri Lankin Stout that sat in primary for 5 weeks. Notice how tight the yeast cake is? None of that got racked over to my bottling bucket. And the beer is extremely clear.
That little bit of beer to the right is all of the 5 gallons that DIDN'T get vaccumed off the surface of the tight trub. When I put 5 gallons in my fermenter, I tend to get 5 gallons into bottles. The cake itself is like cement, it's about an inch thick and very, very dense, you can't just tilt your bucket and have it fall out. I had to use water pressure to get it to come out.
This is the last little bit of the same beer in the bottling bucket, this is the only sediment that made it though and that was done on purpose, when I rack I always make sure to rub the autosiphon across the bottom of the primary to make sure there's plenty of yeast in suspension to carb the beer, but my bottles are all crystal clear and have little sediment in them.
Half the time I forget to use moss, and you can't tell the difference in clarity.
THIS is where the latest discussion and all your questions answered.
We have multiple threads about this all over the place, like this one,so we really don't need to go over it again, all the info you need is here;
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/secondary-not-john-palmer-jamil-zainasheff-weigh-176837/
You'll find that more and more recipes these days do not advocate moving to a secondary at all, but mention primary for a month, which is starting to reflect the shift in brewing culture that has occurred in the last 4 years, MOSTLY because of many of us on here, skipping secondary, opting for longer primaries, and writing about it. Recipes in BYO have begun stating that in their magazine. I remember the "scandal" it caused i the letters to the editor's section a month later, it was just like how it was here when we began discussing it, except a lot more civil than it was here. But after the Byo/Basic brewing experiment, they started reflecting it in their recipes.
But rather than re-invent like other's have said, there are thousands of threads on this, many of us have been doing it for 5 or more years, and talking about it on here, and the thread I linked above had just about every bit of info and answered question anyone could think of on it, so anything else is pretty redundant.