I have been a "long form" and "beat their content" kinda guy for a long time. I am sure that my competitors and my visitors expect that out of me. It's what I expect out of myself. Attitude is really important in most competitive endeavors.
Before I start working on content, I look at what's out there and make a judgement on my abilities to beat it. If I don't have the resources and abilities to compete, I don't compete. Don't step into the ring with the heavyweights and expect things will turn out pretty. AI lot of people are not honest with themselves or are fooled that 10X length is 10X quality.
I am not going to say that my site is full of 10x content. If I can produce 2x, I think that I have killer stuff. 1.5X is fantastic. There is some stiff competition out there. Honestly, 10x against the rest of the world is going to be waayyyy too expensive, extremely rare, honestly, impossible for me to produce. I'd rather spend the same money on five 2x articles or nine 1.1X articles. Most of them will be at or near the top of Google a year or so later.
Some sites are defined by their long form content. These sites are often built around encyclopedia-type articles. If your goal is to beat Wikipeidia for a one-word query, you better have good stuff and a lot of it. I have not seen any brilliant stubs up there for a long time - not even on wikipedia.org.
One of the major values of long form content is its word diversity which qualifies it to rank for lots of long tail keywords. You start making money from the long tail before the head brings in anything. The long tail funds the sustained attack and might make you a profit even if the head attack fails.
I will admit that I don't read to the end of most articles that I click into. I start reading at the top and then scan when I've got the gist. The solution was described by Dan Petrovic, who presented on inverted pyramid writing in a recent Whiteboard Friday. Begin with a defining paragraph and then add deeper content and surprises below. II believe in what he said about hypotext and subheadings, but I wouldn't use any "click to view" formatting. I would put all of the text out into the open because I believe that "click to view" content does poorly in longtail.
I think that your audience is really important. If you run a popular news site and your audience comes straight to you daily then you can really kick ass with short form content that is big on panache. That kind of content will also be shared like crazy. Here 10X content can be short.
(ADDED: If you read today's post on the Moz Blog by Eric Eng, you will see how much traffic The Atlantic and other sites can immediately receive from Facebook. If you have an audience that will share your content socially a short viral article can be kickass. So, this is a way that a site without much SERP presence or a direct audience can win with 10X short form. However, it is really hard for most authors - even professional viral writers - to produce that type of article - even if they are intentionally trying to produce it.)
However, if yours is a site that has an audience that arrives from search, from one word queries or multi-word queries, then you better have a strategy to please Google first or you will get no traffic. From my experience, Google likes long form content with a diversity of keywords, written with precision and accuracy. I have been betting my money on that for a long time. I enjoy panache but I don't think it will work when the reader wants deep nitty gritty or are looking for specific facts that are not in the quick presentation.