david weaver
Working contrary grain flawlessly is something people should be able to do two weeks after they've started. The issue is that nobody seems to think that it's worth teaching new students. First, we have to get them to learn to sharpen over 14 weeks. Then, we have to run them through a 2 hour plane improvement cycle. Then 7 more weeks on various types of dovetails.

They might not have the dexterity on day one to sharpen well with a single stone, but a decent washita and a strop, and a #4 plane that has been set up for them (not in an idealized way, but in a "this hasn't been used in 4 decades, but we can have it ready in 14 minutes" kind of way) - that would be about all that's needed.

It might take about a half hour to teach someone to use a cap iron, and give them a few pictures of what they're aiming at for set. It should be very easy. Online, it's made to be very difficult and it requires all kinds of tools in addition to the 4. It shouldn't.

Then there are discussions about rounding the cap iron or not like this, and the answer is, who cares either way? It's not really important.

But there is one thing you mentioned that's awfully difficult to overcome, and that is planing over a large wide surface (because smoothing a table top wouldn't actually involve many sharpening cycles - my ash bench top required 1...one...uno (with a horrid stanley 70s iron)...anyway, the real issue here is that planing a large wide and long surface can be quite painful. If you're cutting furniture out of CNCs and it looks like half of it came from the jetsons, and the customer doesn't really care about any of this stuff, run it through a wide belt sander and scrape it (and I say scrape only because it's faster than sanding and involves ingesting a whole lot less).

For the average dude standing in a shop and who doesn't want to outlay much, doing it the way someone did it 200 years ago is probably going to be awfully useful. The really hard part is finding good material and designing something that looks really good. And layout, marking and clamping. The planing ought to be really easy.