Yep. Note how often young writers who wish to someday be novelists care about word count in a piece they've written and how many words they write a day, but fail to mention the quality of those words, or the amount of time and effort spent in getting it razor-sharp and arrow-straight.

I feel that this is far from the only misconception of poetry that is generally harmful to poetry as a genre though. For example, some think that writing poems is all about sticking to conventions, which are locked in a vault somewhere in Europe and written on a tablet made of some unchangeable material, like the incarnation of the perfect kilogram is reported to be.

Poetry is an art and like any medium of human expression it needs to change as the human experience changes. That non-poetry readers are most often familiar with short poems is most likely not (entirely) their fault. It's like Chinese-American food: it's created to suit the tastes of those who eat it, not the ones that create it. Some people are cool with never leaving the comfort of crab-rangoons and that's fine, but they should be able to immediately understand that they are in no way equipped to comment on Chinese food in general.

This is not to say that short poems cannot be serious poems. There are of course, many excellent short poems, but they are excellent first and short second, not excellent because they are short. The idea that length has anything to do with its efficacy or artistry is silly. It's like saying that 1,000 feet of spears is deadlier than two feet of H-bomb because the spears cover more ground when laid end to end.