david weaver
I'm not going to speak for Brian, but I will say from my perspective that it is possible to do a lot of things with machines that can be done by hand. But when the rubber hits the road, human nature has people cutting corners and adapting designs to machines. Even nice ones. Warren has mentioned one reason - cost to do things that are simple by hand vs. what they are with machines. Human nature itself and economy of effort (some would call it laziness) will leave people saying, even if it's an effort issue more than cost, "well, it doesn't have to look *exactly* the same".

And I'm not entirely hand tool like warren. I have a bunch of small power tools, just no big stationary ones. Your question about the strips, I probably would've done those with a machine, too, unless I was looking to make the project more interactive . It wouldn't be that hard to make them, but it might be difficult to make 20 of them as fast as you could with power tools.