The animations were not added to intentionally slow down players Explore battles.
If anything, it is just to have consistent UI and animation between the Kingdom maps and paths. The Kingdom Quest battles have the path and animation, and as Explore uses it’s own map, the design was carried over.
The animations also show you progressing to the next battle and side quest battles becoming available - while obvious to existing players, is beneficial to new players.
Feedback was shared about this in the beta and the animations were sped up and I also highlighted the existing feedback around animations in Gems of War - also suggesting linking these animations to the existing Animation Speed settings that exist within the game, or just an option to tap to skip the animation.
The team made sure that the amount of clicks required remained the same, and you didn’t have to interact with the map to access the battles like you do in Quests.
I understand the importance of playing Explore battles for farming rewards within a specific period of time - While obviously that is not the design/intention of the game mode - and I did mention before the update went live that there would be comments on the animations and any additional time added (though more specifically to E1-12) once the update went live.
As mentioned in this thread already, the team said it’s something they will be keeping an eye on. At the moment, all I can do is track the number of comments we see from it to pass that on.
Animations will never be something that will be just totally removed though. But the QOLs exist where I have passed on other suggestions to address your comments around them.