I don't know. Hunger has a severe malus to non-Praxis training, IIRC it's basically the inverse of To Shatter Heaven? So the fact that we get, what, a handful of extra days to spend on what we have to assume are not life-threatening challenges are likely to produce much, much less progress than spending that time on a riskier venture like the Tower, and consequently increases our risk when Ber finally shows up.
I also mentioned safer, and this is presuming that their won't be Errantry challenges for whom finding and completing won't take a much, much shorter amount of time for commensurate like with the mizuki situation. A situation that I might remind people was a non training growth option that was not life threatening, the life threatening part not coming into effect till later when the Rotbeast showed up due to outside factors that we're the immediate consequences of Hunger's actions except in the loosest sense.
But let's assume from a pick and rank increase standpoint you're correct.
All we need to outscale Bearic is getting ADS, and hopefully we can get OaF instead. However, going at more dangerous challenges that take longer to complete is anti-synergestic with our main source of progression for our power, which is the arete we generate in thread and possbly the relative IC time between updates that makes our progression faster in IC terms.
Now, given that the Decimator Lens only helps in locating Huntress Moon targets and it halves the time of both chances, I think it's pretty likely that the longer tasks involves more uneventful time locating and reaching said locations which will result in a timeskip. Now, you could just call this baseless speculation, that maybe will have the same or more amount of updates within a similar timeframe, and I'll leave you to that belief if you do.
However, what is explicit is that dealing with the Tower has a death chance and is way more dangerous then the Contest of Ages. This has been confirmed by Rihaku numerous times. This makes it very likely, based off past behavior, that people will end up spending Arete on non EFB things that set us back from getting the power needed to outscale Ber or to mitigate said danger. Maybe we won't, and we'll only pick the safest options assuming said options aren't still moderate dangerous to Hunger or his companions or innoncent people's lives and gamble by going with areteless picks until we can afford a EFB. Sometimes the thread has done that and it has worked out. More often however, our fellow voters myself included have not done those things, and so I think some suspicion that they won't in this case is more warranted then the opposite in lieu of that.
Edit: The Truth of matter is, the real easiest way to outscale Ber is not get in situations where we want to spend Arete or result in a lot of timeskips.
