After making the above comment I did a quick Google search and found a paper entitled "Kolmogorov Complexity and Computational Complexity" by Lance Fortnow.  The paper is about resource-bounded variants of Kolmogorov complexity.  After giving the standard definition and some consequences he writes the following.

> Of course this definition of Kolmogorov complexity makes any complexity theorist cringe: what good is a small program [for] $x$ if it takes the life of the universe to produce $x$?

Perhaps he could give you more precise pointers to the literature.

[Edit] - Your main observation has been made before, by Henry Cohn, on MathOverflow.  See the last paragraph of his answer [here][1].

  [1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/149115/deep-theorems-and-long-proofs/#149123