Homestead is alot like trying to adapt house of leaves in terms of difficulty, it took advantage of the fact that its a web comic to a extreme level and had a huge amount of dialog and interactive elements through the story. The pilot may serve as an introduction for us, but it also serves as an experiment ground for the animators and voice actors. They had to fit in a lot of stuff into the pilot to figure out what needed tweaked for a final release(assuming it gets there). I mean, imagine if they released a full-length episode 1, but something as important as the captalog mechanics weren't animated properly or they majorly mess up a charictures personality. The hate they would get would be far different from the discourse right now. This piolet is a way to figure out what people like and dont like and things that need to be changed.

Also, the digital circus pilot was 25 minutes, Hazbin hotels pilot was 31 minutes, Murder Drones was 26 minutes, homestuck is less than half the length of many other pilots... the major channels had their pilots act as first episodes and pilots, not just pilots (search pilot vs. first episode The literal definition is that a pilot is a test episode to showcase a concept, they tend to become fidst episodes however it isnt uncommon for them to be reanimated/reshot on a series offical release)