LT Commander here. It's not that it's TOO long, it's just the combination of being long, easy, and unrewarding.

I can literally not fire a shot and take out about 10 guys at a time with my away team. It just takes 20 minutes. And in that 20 minutes i'll get 5 skill points and maybe 300 creds worth of loot.

It is fun when it's challenging and I LOVE vaporizing klingons and gorn, but damn, my weapons seem to do nothing to them besides my occasional exploit attack.

Sounds like a weapon dammage bug to me. My LTcdr does significant dammage with my MK2 phaser rifle in combat. I also find that my Away Team is very handy at combat as well, I figured it was correct since I leveld all my AT skills to 5.