david weaver
Here's an example where it counts. The blanket chest panels I had paid a pro to run through a beach sander years ago moved between that day and the next day when I was going to finish them. The last drum on the beach was 80 grit, not really suitable for finish.

The next day, I wanted to plane, them, but the only suitable plane I had at the time was mujingfang's 63 degree smoother. I thought I had it made.

It was too steep for soft maple (fuzzy finish) and a real bear to try to finish plane with given the slight amount of movement I'd liked to have plane out of the panels. This was so long ago that I'm not sure if I even had a card scraper. What little the panels moved, I'd have planed each in 15 minutes front and back with a stanley plane (if I'd have known how to use it), but I ended up buying a narrow scraper plane instead (which finished the job nicely).

I could've gone through hand sand grits and then finished with the small sander I had at the time, but I was attempting to learn something. It wasn't pleasant, even though it was long.

I planed the plywood for my last (plywood) cabinet today. It was quick and far more enjoyable than the process that I've used for all of the others (progressive sanding). The plywood is rotary sawn stuff. I think it probably takes me more time to sand, but I never timed it. If I hadn't been chasing this efficiency, I'd never have found a good way to plane plywood. You can scrape it instead, of course, but it takes about the same amount of time and is more dusty. I made a mistake sanding the rest of it, but it's too late - the rest of the cabinets are already done and finished.

Efficient would be buying all of this stuff, but enjoyable is being able to do parts of it with minimal time where you're either holding something vibrating or not doing work (e.g, solving tearout issues, etc). That means lowering risk.

After buying a nice plunge router and routing every groove in all of these cabinets, I reset a dado plane today to 0.48 inches. I wish I'd have never used power tools for any part of this other than cutting the panels out. I'm headed back to the shop now to pin the sides all in a row and cut the last dados.

Everyone has to choose what's enjoyable to them. Trying to work entirely by hand with single iron planes (which I thought was the solution 7 or 8 years ago) made for a lot less enjoyment, unexpected tearout, no feeling of progress with certain parts of the process and overshot marks. The double iron is a great way to work slow.