That is not what the Blocktime is set at that causes that but the starting difficulty. With a low starting difficulty and a longer retarget time you get what is called instamining where the first blocks are mined at a much faster rate until the hashrate evens out.
FlashCoin actually had 10 second Blocktimes but anything under 30 seconds (as you mentioned with Quark) causes a lot of Orphan Blocks because of the latency between miners.
Will you shut the fuck up about blocktimes, thats newbie shit for gods sake. Let Spoet put his coin together how he wants to and lets do this. I'll put real money into Spoetnikcoin because every other dev disappears leaving you high and dry and if there's one thing i know about crypto's it's that Spoetnik ain't going away anytime soon. You may detest the guy but he could be your savior, which in itself is a sort of sad state of affairs but he may be just the guy to turn things around.
Blocktimes and the protocol are number one, if for example SpoetnikCoin had 30 Second Blocktimes, now that may seem fast but it's effect is it can cause more orphan blocks and more data added to the Blockchain than it needs because Spoetnikcoin would not be something you would buy cups of coffee with (more of an asset), so you would not have transactions in every Block. This creates a lot of empty Blocks so the Blockchain grows at a much faster pace than it needs to. A large amount of Blocks will make your wallet take a very long time to Sync to the highest Block.
IMO 1-3 minutes is good, 2 minutes is about the time I think is most optimal
Also, if I remember right there were Coins that hardforked for faster Blocktimes.