I hate this too. Feels like this was a conscious decision so I'm not as optimistic about it going away, but want to add my 2 cents. I depend on that timer for finishing and placing in solo quests. Now it's much harder to time things in that key final rush because the times disappear every few seconds.
Thanks for your feedback, we've seen similar from other players as well so I'll be talking to the development team and see if this decision still makes sense.
I do hope they change it back...and that they work on the order of events...All the special events keep kicking away all of the other events, so the hourly and daily ones get pushed so far down to the bottom that we have to scroll so far to see them... That and the disappearing times kind of make timing things harder than necessary.