As for increasing the time of play, how is alternately activating each and every squadron during the Squadron Phase any faster than having a carrier mechanic that can deploy them en masse using the Activate Squadrons command? In a normal game you will be activating all of your squadrons every turn anyway regardless of what command you end up resolving for each of your ships. The fact that some of your squadrons are holed up inside your ships eliminates the need to manually activate them and thus would make games actually faster.

In a match, launch / recovery is a bit of a headache that distracts from the ship combat.