Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you deploy release-like builds to your QA team (as you should), a tripled-build time is a bit problematic if you're trying to iterate quickly.
Who needs to "iterate" so quickly that several minutes added to your build time becomes a huge issue?
And I can only do that with release builds if I want useful numbers. I've had us split up apps over build times because of Multidex (for example, most of our AWS centric code lives in a separate app that exposes specific functions via an AIDL interface because the SDK was bringing in too many methods)