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World-building: a technique developed by some fantasy writers who fear that their readers are incapable of picking up on some carefully supplied world-hinting in order that they can perform the actual brick-by-brick building using their own imaginations.
Some love it (like they love a character), while some think it's often an attempt to micromanage the reader's imagination by filling in gaps that often don't really need explicit filling in.
I myself like books that are the right length for their stories. I've read novellas that were too long and behemoth door-stoppers that were too short. But padding is always padding regardless of the overall pagecount/genre. People just have different padding tolerance thresholds.
A page-count preference when buying/choosing books to read has never made much sense to me, but I recognize that everyone is not me.
IF indies do indeed trend shorter (and I'm not convinced they do), I would guess it had almost everything to do with the fact they know they have 100% control over how long their readers will wait until their next installment/release. They don't need to give their fans something huge to gnaw on to carry them through years of waiting.
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