In this case, I think they are. Most of the last issues of (print) Dragon had either a "Demonomicon", "Core Beliefs" or similar article as one of the featured articles. These were big, meaty articles usually of about 10-14 pages in length. There tended not to be more than one of these a month, but that's hardly surprising when space is at such a premium. They may be more common now, although I'd be surprised if they're much more common, even now?
Huh, I didn't remember those being quite that long.
Last month's Dragon clocked in at:
Domain of Dread: 13 pages
Fighter Essentials: 12 pages
Explore Airspur: 8 pages
Playing Githzerai: 6 pages
Primal Items: 10 pages
Bahamut's Champions: 10 pages
Domain's of Eberron and the Forgotten Realms: 14 pages
Average: 10.4
Median: 10
That's just one month, but the large number of lengthy articles and the absolute dearth of short, two page spread features has really been jumping out at me since the online format began. Now, that isn't everything that was in Dragon. I didn't include Ampersand, the Editorial, Confessions, the RPGA report, and so on, mostly because they don't have page number listings and I'm lazy. And they're shorter. And I haven't got any print Dragon magazines around these days to compare, so I'm just going by my recollection, which was that they tended to feature one large article, generally the one the cover art depicted, several medium sized articles in the 4 to 6 page range, and then a number of smaller 2 to 4 page articles which were generally the ones that contained crunch.
So at least for the moment I'm going to have to stick by my guns and maintain that there's been a format shift away from multiple short, recurring articles, and towards a smaller number of large, feature articles.