Do ATB upgrades affect the overall charge time?
From some experimenting i did myself a atb bar with 3 slots takes about 4.3 ~ 4.4 seconds to charge. increasing the amount of gauges increased the times a little but not by a significant amount +- 0.2 seconds.
Here's a table of my findings
Atb slots | Recharge Time
----------------------------------------------
3 | 4.3 ~ 4.4 seconds
4 | 4.5 ~ 4.6 seconds
5 | 4.7 ~ 4.8 seconds
6 | 4.8 ~ 4.9 seconds
To answer your questions:
Yes upgrading the number of ATB slots does increase charge time. But at 6 charges you pretty much have an efficiency of around 180% compared to the charge speed at 3 slots
to confirm, here are my recharge averages:
ATB level | full recharge | recharge per bar
3 | 4.32 | 1.44
4 | 4.46 | 1.11
5 | 4.66 | 0.93
6 | 4.79 | 0.80