Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a few years. They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games…
The format has been changing way too often, if anything.
> 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks.
Not really: 12 or even 14 games is short, which is exactly why players aren't particularly willing to take risks - short format makes it hard to catch up should they fall behind. The format used to be 24 games in Kasparov times, and some WC matches were decided by the "first to X wins" rule, which could last very long, given that draws wouldn't push things forward (and for example Alekhine beated Capablanca after 34 games).
> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It wasn't such a steamroll, the score doesn't tell a full story. Nepo's play quality was excellent and he arguably had more winning chances throughout the first half of the match. His first loss was in the longest WC game ever played (136 moves, and theoretically drawish almost until the very end when Nepo finally slipped). He collapsed psychologically right after, starting to make errors that - in his own words - were "simple things you would never overlook in a blitz game".
In part due to that gruelling, exhausting loss, for sure, but some have theorized he may also have folded due to realizing how many good chances he had missed before that.
GM Sam Shankland (US champion of 2018, for those not up to date with the who-is-who of chess world) went as far as to say Ian was two different players in the match: Nepo A and Nepo B.
Subverting people's expectations, Nepo won the Candidates now so convincingly (some suspected he might not recover, and certainly not to such an extent) that I see no reason why one would expect a landslide Carlsen's victory in the upcoming match.
Especially since there's an enormous difference between having NEVER played a WC match (which was Ian's situation the last time), and having already played one.
To quote Kramnik reminiscing on his first WC match: "it was still a very unfamiliar situation, like playing all your life for Lokomotiv and then coming out to play for Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League. Of course, you have to get used to the new situation, kick the ball a couple of times so they don't laugh at you."
> Even Carlsen didn't like the format
Yeah, well - he didn't like it, isn't that a bummer :) But come on, it's not like Carlsen has no say in the matter of the format, especially now that he already is a 5x world champion. He could have negotiated a different one with FIDE - or at least try. Obviously it's too late for that once the challenger has already been revealed, the time for that was before the cycle started. The format isn't set in stone though, far from it, and the #1 player, the reigning WC, has a lot of weight to throw around.
Carlsen may have not liked the format from an objective point of view, but the format was certainly very convenient for him. He excels in rapid chess, so if his winning chances are, say, around 80% in the classical portion of the match, they probably reach something like 95% once it comes to rapid tiebreaks. And the shorter the format, the larger the likelihood of getting to the tiebreaks.
> I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
This isn't something new. Kasparov was still the world's #1 for years after he lost the title to Kramnik. (He had actually hoped for a rematch, but they couldn't work the conditions out, and since age was catching up with him, he finally retired.)
