That's pretty cool! It's neat to see the tradeoffs between time and material costs. They really needed to "close the loop" though and get other experts to follow some of their supposed optimal methods vs. the human developed one and rank them. I imagine there are good reasons that the human designs are non-optimal. For example there seems to be no attention to grain direction which even for sheet goods will matter aesthetically.
I’ll have to look at it again, but I don’t think they take into account blade ware and machine maintenance. While minimal at first, it does add up over time.
It would also be interesting to compare hand tools vs. power tools (i.e. Roy vs. Norm).