POK or Base game

Hello! Quick question for the experienced here:

We have a group of 6 getting together next month for a TI4 game. All of us have played 1-2 times, but base game only. We intend to do an asynchronous milty draft, but noticed that the online tools only support games of 7 for the base game? The hope is to have everything setup and decided before anyone arrives to cut down on setup time.

My two questions are: Can we do the draft with 6 slices on the base game, and if so is there a good tool? Secondly is it worth convincing my group to learn/buy POK? We already find the game pretty dense and rules heavy (but we do love it) so any guidance is most appreciated. It will be a bit of a "sell" to get this group into POK I believe, but I'm open to it.

One argument I've heard is that POK can be quicker, like games tend to end earlier? That's a really strong argument because nobody wants to play for 12 hours if possible.