I feel like you're blowing past some pretty significant psychological factors. People find it interesting and valuable to own a one-of-a-kind item that nobody e

I feel like you're blowing past some pretty significant psychological factors. People find it interesting and valuable to own a one-of-a-kind item that nobody else can ever have. An artist might paint pretty much the same thing a hundred times, but those small differences make each one slightly more valuable than a mere print. And the fewer instances there are in the world, the more valuable it is, at least in theory. Also, people like it when, for example, a favorite table was made over tens of hours of work by an expert carpenter, and they imagine that it was a labor of love by someone happy to have their work be a part of someone's life. It's personal somehow. There's also a lot of signaling involved in these "artisanal" or "handmade" marketing labels, because they are legitimately associated with higher-quality goods. Manufacturers mechanize processes to cut costs, and if they're so concerned with cutting manufacturing costs maybe they cut corners on quality too - this is how "Made in China" got a bad reputation even though of course China is perfectly capable of making high-quality goods. Finally, if an object is individually made by hand then there's a kind of automatic quality control that doesn't necessarily exist in an automated process. And I seriously doubt that anyone will claim that a knife sharpened by a robot arm reproducing the exact movements of a human will produce an inferior product. The problem is that most automated sharpeners are some variant of a rotary grinding wheel run linearly along the blade and, unless you're sharpening a machete, there are all sorts of aspects of the blade geometry that are ignored by this process but can be accounted for by a skilled worker at a whetstone.