It doesn't strike me as surprising that the sail would take longer than the boat. The skill to make a boat is impressive but the mechanics of getting it done aren't enormous.
Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.
I encourage you to watch some videos online of traditional (mostly hand-tools) Shipwrights. Even with the use of a bandsaw to do the rough milling, it is an arduous and lengthy process. Shipwrights also work with some of the longest planks of wood any form of woodworking does. In the days before machines, there would be scores of workers simply preparing the wood and getting it ready for the ship building.
My hunch would be the reason shipbuilding is faster is it is easier to scale to multiple workers, and there are parts you can do in parallel.
The sewing of sail fabric is something different. You need to use heavy duty needle and force it through the fabric. It is somewhat similar I would imagine as dealing with leather.
I bet weavers fought like hell against textile industrialization. I'm not an historian, but there must have been such a conflict, and given the scale of it I bet it was bloody. Industrialization freed them from this toil, but at the cost of centralizing the means of production. It is a strange thing, progress.
The Luddites were a movement of British textile workers who fought industrialization, at first with sabotage then with open rebellion that was violently put down [1].
“The Luddites were a secret oath-based organisation of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery”
All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering, exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.
Less suffering for some of us, at least in the physical toiling sense and in the short term, but with more humans on the planet than ever before, and so many servings to funnel wealth to a minority, I reckon we’re still collectively suffering quite a bit, with more to come as climate change exacerbates weather extremes and aberrations. And then there’s the suffering of non-human animals. What we’re doing doesn’t feel like progress if I value ecological resilience through diversity, deep connection with the environment and my community, and a history unbroken for thousands of years.
Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.