It kind of failed if you had a fancy CD player (or CD-ROM drive) that could show the lengths of tracks, if every other song on an album is 3 minutes long, then the last one probably isn’t 30 minutes long.
I don’t know what the point of this post is, other than that it sucks when a modern release removes the hidden track 
I grew up with friends who were into prog. We would give them such a hard time over their 17 minute songs.