Yeah, the violence has always bothered me a bit, but I'm more bothered by first-person shooter games, because they are more realistic. MK violence is so over the top, it's almost like Tom & Jerry, or Road Runner.
As for how long it took me to make the Bubblegum Crisis video, I spent about a thousand hours (not including render time) on setting up shots, lighting, animating, modeling, texturing, compositing, and so on. You could probably add another 200 hours to this figure if you want to count the time I spent modeling my generic human model and the setup time on that, which was done prior to this beginning of this project. Still, 1000 hours isn't that long if you figure it at 40 hours of work per week, then it works out to be 25 weeks, or about 6 months. However, having the discipline to work on something without getting too sidetracked, or getting burnt out is much easier said than done. When I was feeling burnt out, or the weather was nice outside, I was probably only working 20 hours a week, which put me behind the schedule I had set for myself.
As for render times, I would set the render multipass settings according to how long I was going to be away from my computer. If I was going to sleep, then I would start a 7 hour render, which would probably be between 5 to 9 passes per frame. If I was going out to run errands, then I would try to gauge it at 3 hours or less, so probably just 2 or 3 passes per frame. I would have to jot down on a list the shots that needed to be rendered, or re-rendered, in case I needed to take a long break and forgot what was ready to be rendered, and thus, not waste any render time.
My storyboarding probably only took about 20 hours, since I based a lot of my shots on the original show, and because my storyboards were very crude.