Yes it does :-(
We introduced this delay because initially on the Android platform (I mean, not Selendroid) we would re-establish the ADB connection within the uiautomatorExit method, so we had to wait after disabling the data connection for UI Automator to take notice and exit. And sometimes, it takes time, so we cranked up that sleep several time, before we realized that actually sometimes the uiautomatorExit was not called until the next attempt at sending an ADB command. That's when we finally decided to handle the ADB and UI Automator restart here and not in uiautomatorExit, but the 10s sleep somehow managed to slip through the refactoring.
So yes, polling would be better, we'll make the change and poll using our new "ping" method in adb