That's what came to mind for me as well. The games have some fantastic elements, but a lot of the gameplay loops are designed to be slow. I recall reading that

That's what came to mind for me as well. The games have some fantastic elements, but a lot of the gameplay loops are designed to be slow. I recall reading that preventing 'assembly line' mechanics was a deliberate choice. As a result, in New Horizon you can't do bulk crafting, you need to perform multiple button presses and watch an animation for every single one. Shopping is equally bad, where buying stock from a visiting NPC takes orders of magnitude longer than it might in an RPG, because you need to button through multiple pages of dialogue after each purchase.