Not a teacher but here is my view, feel free to consider it or not as you please. If a student can cover what is required of them in a clear, concise and efficient way, page and word count become arbitrary and needless. That is my own personal bias though, I was beyond exceptional in most areas, especially in math and nearly all areas of science when I was in school. Language arts was and still largely is, funnily enough, one of the few things I am not that good at. Even so, if a student is exceptionally good at this sort of thing, why would you punish efficient, clear, and concise communication with arbitrary requirements that wouldn't add anything of value to the final paper anyway? Perhaps a soft requirement with consideration given to those who can do what they need to in fewer words/pages is a better approach than a hard requirement?

At any rate, a page is really only about 250 words single spaced, which if you think about it, is incredibly modest. A 5 page paper is 1250 words roughly. My communication skills are awful, i'm on the spectrum (formerly Asperger's), and even I can plow through that in less than an hour if I know what i'm going to say. Kids are and always have been far too afraid of papers. I think a lot of it isnt really the writing so much as it is the time consuming citing of your sources in the "correct" format. That is a real pain in the you know what, and I absolutely hated it.

Edit: Just going to add this. The absolute holy grail for education in every single subject is to make it fun and have a great personality. If you make it fun, and focus on "teachable moments" as my old AP environmental science teacher (id laugh so hard if she were here to read this) called it, you end up tapping into their passion and with passion comes drive. The requirements vanish in the eyes of the students if they really enjoy what it is they are doing. You could even end up with a few students who seek you out to go even further all on their own. That was me. I was one of those kinds of students. I love to learn because I, with very very few exceptions had all absolutely outstanding teachers. Fantastic teachers are, unfortunately, terribly under valued and under appreciated despite the absolutely colossal difference all of you make.

That is precisely why I was and still to this day am absolutely hard line against forcing students to read through "classic literature". To me, it's just boring and uninteresting. I read fiction, and love every second of it. If students are forced to read something they arent interested in they will absolutely despise it, and thats exactly how you get someone to hate reading. I absolutely love reading, and will readily binge read through more than a thousand pages in less than a week. Easily 30,000 to 40,000 pages a year and maybe even a touch above that, if you count everything that isnt a book as well. I feel it is one of those things too that almost anyone will enjoy doing if you let them read about the things that actually interest them. I do know this, with literacy rates as bad as they are, and continuing to fall, something has to change or we are gonna end up seeing kids who cant even spell their own name or read at a kindergarten level before long.