It's probably fair to say that it's neither a bug or a "feature". It is by design, but it does seem that a lot of people are using shorelines much larger than their maps, and for exporting raster this can make things very slow.
We'll probably add an option (or just change the default behaviour) to include just a clipped shoreline in the same way that the contour view shows. Having said that, being able to export a shoreline without a map can also be useful. Note that if you export a vector map then the extra shoreline doesn't materially increase the time taken.