I'll add my voice to the crowd for reducing the animation times to their previous greatness. EM used to be so fast and fun when it was unashamedly ST focused and the best at it, prior to the cast time nerfs. With the meta now steamrolling and AoE nuking everything, to make EM viable in groups again we'd need to either make EM have a bunch of AoE or some fancy mechanic to fit in with everything else or (please do this one 😉) leave it distinct and make it the ST damage king again. There's nothing wrong with having different sets have different flavours, I think most people will be fine with having no AoE on the best ST damage set, it's a common-sense trade-off...
...that being said, I could see the ET animation being set to 1s again (it already has a downside in the -HP) but leaving the TF time as-is while making it have splash damage like Electric Melee's Thunder Strike. Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer just a lower cast time for TF and leave it ST but that might be a middle ground? 🙂