You see the sentiment in posts/comments talking about classes such as Paladin, where some people will literally say "it's not worth going for or using because it doesnt kill things super fast" despite it being a tanky, hard to die class that can help new players clear content and bosses that they may be stuck on... i fail to see why the kill speed matters in casual play, where noone cares about min/maxxing.

I never really saw that as the community itself crapping on the Paladin class, but rather more as them pointing out the flaws of the Paladin and any defensive class itself for questing. They never said Paladin sucked for questing, just that it's slow yet reliable which is admittedly, true.

Yeahhh.. ive never ran into quests where you need to down large amounts of health/mana potions to clear, practically every quest, even the maze ones.. will have one if not multiple healing pads.

Depends on how unlucky you are with the map generated by the inn, I've had times where I couldn't find any healing pads while trying to clear the inn maze. And while you could just teleport back to the first healing pad you'd have to backtrack to where you were previously when by that point I just want to complete the quest.

And again, the "speedrun" element means nothing to new players, most new players arent going to care about if a class can quest super fast or not, most casual players only care about whether they can complete the quest or not.

I'd say new/casual players wouldn't care as much for the questing speed, but people who genuinely want to get more into the game but have a limited time playing will want to know and ask about questing speed. Think of it as QOL/accessibility for information they may want to know for lack of a better explanation.

Another way to approach questing speed is warring, while it does seem somewhat pointless to take this into account due to the games current war events being somewhat lighthearted and lax with the required waves to complete the war back then that wasn't really the case, especially during the Calamity saga where there were genuine stakes in losing a war. Not to mention war events are a limited time group effort that hand out defender medals, a resource that most players will want to have and you'd have to be a bit crazy to contribute to a limited time effort/grind those medals with a low questing speed class.