For whom? Surely the authors can find an hour after submitting the paper to a journal?
Beware that a reviewer easily spend a full week on reviewing a paper, and there are typically three of them. So if one hour of conversation can save three weeks work, it sounds worth it.
For the time comparison, I’m not sure, it doesn’t seem quite apples-to-apples:
1) It is scheduled time vs unscheduled.
2) There must be some base rate consideration… the papers being discussed here were planned to be desk-rejected.
Maybe it could be a good process for saving papers that were going to be desk-rejected, but I dunno, that seems like it’d just lower the quality standards.