Our bench is 3m long and is essastone, no idea whether that is the maximum length though sorry. You can never have too much pantry space. You can always store small appliances etc in the pantry too.
Same here. Thanks to your 3D drawing suggestion, I decided to try creating one and it definitely does help us visualize better.
Is your bench a single slab? I agree we can never have too much pantry space but should we create a fourth pantry in place of the drawers at the corner of the 2nd layout? So we would have a full wall of pantries? It might look better but I think we prefer to have more bench space instead.