Mincha's brevity is not simply a stylistic feature of the service, it is a practical accommodation to the single hardest problem the daily prayer cycle creates: fitting a third prayer into the middle of an ordinary working afternoon. Unlike Shacharit, said before the working day begins, and Maariv, said after it ends, Mincha falls when a person is least free, in the middle of business, travel or labour, which is exactly why the rabbis singled it out for special caution and why in practice it is the service most often missed or rushed by otherwise observant Jews. Its permitted window, from halachic midday to sunset, is itself a matter of ongoing calculation rather than a fixed clock time, since halachic midday and the length of a halachic hour both shift with the solar day and the calendar, and observant communities rely on published zmanim, prayer-time tables calculated for their specific location and date, to know precisely when the window opens and closes on any given afternoon.
A workplace or travel accommodation has grown up around the difficulty: many offices with a religious Jewish workforce, and many synagogues, schedule a fixed daily Mincha minyan timed to catch the window reliably, often paired immediately with Maariv once nightfall permits it, so that a person can fulfil both obligations in one brief interruption to the day rather than having to break away twice. That combined Mincha-Maariv slot, said back to back at dusk, is now one of the most common forms in which the daily prayer cycle is actually kept by working Jews, a practical solution the rabbinic sources describing separate services for separate times did not anticipate.