emtwo: FormlessOne: It has taken 15 men nearly six months to create this single katana sword. Though fit for a samurai warrior, this sword will likely sell to art collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars

...where it will then likely sit, never used, commissioned solely as a collectible for a rich person. Its potential never realized, it will languish for decades until lost, forgotten, sold, or traded for something with both value and use.

Katanas are probably one of the most mythologized weapons in pop culture, but in reality they were really inadequate and impractical weapons. They're better for ceremonial and artistic purposes, so if it's sitting on some rich asshole's wall, I'd say it is realizing its true potential.

Nonsense. They were excellent weapons in the time and place they were developed for particular styles of warfare. They saw a lot of use in war for a long time. And they answered the question "How do you make good blades out of crap iron?" For pre-industrial steel I am very partial to historic wootz and indo-Persian blades, but I  appreciate the metallurgy and craftsmanship of Japanese edged tools including swords.

KRSESQ: FTFA: It has taken 15 men nearly six months to create this single katana sword.

They need some lessons from Hattori Hanzo.

Everything was more labor intensive before the Industrial Revolution. And if you include the miners and foundry workers involved in extracting the ore and turning it into pieces of steel in what amounts to a continuously stunning bloomery you could hit fifteen people total before it got to the smith. Big whoop.

.... and the fisherman who caught the ray whose skin went onto the hilt and the squirrel that buried the nut that grew into the tree that the woodcutters chopped down and sold to the charcoal burners who made the charcoal that went to the foundry and the smithy. And the guy who quarried and cut the stone the polisher used to finish the blade......

Context-free numbers are free of context.

In reality there were good swords and bad swords. Quality always costs money. Stuff takes longer and uses more labor when you don't have machinery. The suppliers knew their customers' requirements, and it's not like fifteen guys stopped everything to do one sword and one sword only. Because that is a great way to starve. The miners delivered ore to the foundry on a schedule. The foundry had regular orders in a pipeline for their customers -  including smiths - and had graded bins of product. Removing slag from bloom has always been a necessary step in producing useful steel. Hurray for power hammers and Bessemer converters.

Journeymen made most swords with the Master supervising and occasionally smacking them upside the head. And a lot of those were probably standard billets waiting for orders to be tweaked into customized swords.

For a really important contract the Master would start from scratch and pull himself away from other work with his better journeymen, but the forging process itself wouldn't take months. And a bunch of the steps are really not as time consuming or intricate as they make out. Any hardened steel needed to be quenched. Making a clay slurry, plopping it on the blade, and letting it dry adds a few hours, not days. Making the curve in the blade takes the few seconds you would spend quenching anything from a hammer head to an axe.

The craftsmanship and metallurgy could be fantastic, but a lot of this has been bog-standard for a couple thousand years everywhere people used iron.