2. "It's not just these days, it's been like this forever. It's just that no..." In response to In response to 1
... *attention spans* are as short as ever, so albums tend to not have staying power if they extend past like 45 minutes or so (that's sort of an arbitrary number but an educated guess as to where the threshold may be for a lot of people).
I support the shorter album format, always have. A majority of my favorite albums are 13 songs or less, and well under an hour. The only risk being taken is if one of 7 songs is awful it could spoil it.