Well, not really. If you only have one variation in your pattern, maybe, though the repeater only goes up to 32 steps so for longer patterns that's not viable anymore. How about if you have 8 different variations in your pattern?
Besides, that's not the point. Any decent step sequencer out there offers the ability to set different gates lengths per step. I believe that option should be available in the pattern editor without the need to "be creative" about such a basic feature.