I believe the "tunnel length too short" error from the tunnel maker goes back to DMB2, but it's one of those errors that seems to get in the way an awful lot for what could actually be legitimate tunnels.
So I tried commenting out the restriction, and so far... it doesn't seem to do anything particularly surprising or bad. It can generate weird geometry if you're creating a tunnel between two sides that actually don't make sense, but it doesn't crash, and you get the preview to tell you that it's wrong, like all the other existing scenarios you could create invalid tunnels (two faces that are pointing in exactly opposite directions, for instance).
Still - this is one of those intentional design decisions from a while back, so I don't want to go and change it without asking first. Should I remove the restriction?
Sure, remove it if you are confident the restriction isn't necessary. Feel free to remove any restrictions that do not make sense in DLE.