Sounds like this might be a request to be able to opt out of the extreme measures, at risk of maybe some less-than-max-results but in a tolerable time. There is probably a rewrite of repair/recreate underway now, so who knows what’s due to come? From another point of view, a repair or other method can sometimes avoid the need for a full recreate, and a partial recreate is a lighter option if it comes down to a recreate…
That’s not what it always does. There are three passes (presumably increasingly painful) and stop-points:
On top of that, there are other repair tools. Unfortunately, repair has its specific task, as do the others such as purge, list-broken-files, purge-broken-files, and repair in it’s non-recreate behavior. Lack of detailed documentation on what to use does make things worse, but having any manual at all is only about a year old, and possibly one of the many things that could improve with more volunteer help.
What about a manual? explains original author point that troubleshooting is covered by the forum, and I sometimes agree (until computers are better than people at self-healing their ails) but sometimes don’t. There’s a definite volume problem from a large user base having even very occasional issues per user. There’s also a scaling problem (as with code) of not being able to replicate expertise as fast as desired.
There are options for “recreate” in a loose sense, but the other one isn’t called “recreate”, and there’s no single button for restart from 0 (though I’d have thought you’d want the old settings, different destination).
The decision on which way to go now uses experiment and human discussion, but sadly often only after someone finds that a full database recreate (in the tight sense of reading backend) is taking too long. It’s sometimes asked how long it will take, and answers are hard because they vary too much on situations, and simplistic formulas such as download speed and total destination file size don’t help because you’re not supposed to have to download everything, and one can’t know what’s missing without some looking. Still, to your point, it might someday be possible to do estimates, based on factors, for informed options. There are currently plenty of other hot issues to handle, so I can’t forecast when this idea might happen. Possibly you can write a request in forum Features or GitHub issues so that it’s at less risk of being lost.