True, it doesn't solve the basic problem but it would at least address part of it.
Does Waukeen's Rest actually "fail" if you take a long rest?
Some people die in the fire who you might have saved and IIRC, you got a task to save someone there who is part of the "Rescue the Grand Duke" quest, but her death won't make the quest fail. So whether this is a failure or not depends on your character. It won't cut off any story arcs as far I can tell.
Well, that's slight improvement over how it was in the early days at least...
It's not nearly enough, but at least it isn't as ridiculous as "go to WR, see that it's on fire, take a long rest and then do the quest as if nothing happened". I really wish there were more quests we could actually fail and/or events that would happen at certain points even if the player wasn't there and we'd have to deal with the aftermath then.
I didn't know it was different in earlier versions. More evidence for my hypothesis that they didn't plan for this, but that they are using the long rest clock as a stopgap replacement for real in-world time because they made a decision about not having in-world time long ago which they can't rescind without rebuilding fundamental parts of the game, and did not recognize at the time that there are situations where having no time prevents you from implementing plausible causality. Or for some really incomprehensible reason, they were so dedicated to having no time that they rather implemented this immersion-breaking mechanism.
Also, I agree about having more timed events. Pathfinder:KIngmaker felt so much more real because of this. To make most events like this, though, would require more of a predetermined path through the game world, since otherwise too many events would be missed by random chance.
