It won't work either. You still have a person trying to play tricks on others, people resent that. You've transitioned from a self-imposed PvE challenge to an arbitrary one imposed by your boss. The game stops being a game and starts being work with weird rules.

Right, I think it works because it's arbitrary. It just happens to be in a sometimes realistic timeframe for a fix, so you can make a game out of it. If somebody else is setting/influencing the benchmarks, suddenly it stops being fun. You'd complain about "This is terribly balanced. Timer should be at least 30 minutes. Nerf wattage next patch!"

For a naturally occurring timer, you just work within the constraints you're given. That's what they are and there's nobody to blame or change it. (I mean, you could easily put a lower wattage bulb in, but that won't occur to most people)

Or maybe it's like the placebo effect where you know what's going on but somebody could control the timer and it works anyway. Who knows?