Intended for idiots? Sure.
The game never had siege timers at launch and you could repair at any time, which meant you had to have a force large enough to out dps anybody willing to repair. This created another aspect of team work as people would be willing to sacrifice their gold for wood to repair keeps.
Having a repair timer doesn't make sense. Period. Having a repair timer that can be initiated by some lone archer killing a single guard is just idiotic.
As it stands now, you can take a siege engine, aka catapult, and cat down every siege engine on a keep or tower, and the oil, and you won't trigger a flame. However, if you pull some guards the keep / tower gets flamed and nobody can repair anything. That's just pure stupidity.
It makes no sense at all for a keep to have ALL its guards, NO siege on the doors, NO attackers, and yet it's not possible to repair doors because some lone dork kills a few guards. That's just poor game design, poor gameplay, and never existed in the game at all.
Siege timers should depend on siege engines actually sieging the target, or groups of players sieging the doors or defensive siege engines. The total time should be significantly reduced to say, 3 minutes, as opposed to the current 6 / 7 minutes ridiculousness that exists at present.
As it stands now, the timers just make for terrible game play, and we're all here because we love this 20+ year old game.