No, but whatever it is, it's reasonable. I did loops, starting at the newbie spawn area, through to the city, and then out to the lowbie hunting grounds, egress back to the beginning, etc. I found new spawns on each new loop, so the respawn can't be more than a few minutes.
I did the Stone Hive collection (the toy boats) for my toons last night and saw about the same respawn rate. As I did loops around the zone, I was picking up several shinies each round. I ended up buying only a couple of them because I just got tired. Three sets, plus some dupes, in about an hour and half of running around.
Same amount of shinies for me, in about the same amount of time, maybe a bit less. It's a pretty reasonable reward for time spent, I think.
I can't remember if this was confirmation from a dev, there's something like a queue for collections, every time the respawn runs, if the zone is at max spawn points, the next one goes into the queue until the queue is maxed out. Where the normal respawn may be 3 minutes (or whatever), the queue will pop one out every 10 seconds (or whatever) until empty. This may just an observation bias, if you go into a zone that's had no one collecting spawns, you can make a bunch of laps where they are repopping out the wazoo (sometimes right in front of you in the space you just picked up), but once you clear a few times you'll stop finding them as often.
Usually if collections seem to be taking too long to respawn it's because they are spawning in one or two locations on top of each other. These locations might be harder to find or get to, and that's why no one is clearing them. Thus, sooner or later, you'll find a pile of 8 of them in one spot or something.
My guys aren't yet high enough level to get Spirit of the Lost. I have found two so far, both in the exact same spot, on the first-floor elevator platform. No sign of anything else so far.
They can be out in the newbie field, they can be in the caves, they can be on all 3 levels inside, they can be out in the bunny grove.
