The placement of forges, work order boards, storage and cotton gins seems to be a design decision. I would say that they encourage players to move out of Serbule and travel between different towns. I would also think that if you can build your own crafting workshop in your house then the fact you can't get all the crafting equipment in every location will be a driving factor for crafters to get housing. Also guilds when they get backrooms might have full sets of equipment and I can see that being interesting in particular if it is only the guild home city that has a backroom.

I think it was exciting getting better methods to card cotton. If you could build better cotton gins that went faster and gave more perfect cotton or reduced cotton needed to use that would be even more exciting.

The cheesemaking makes me keep all sorts of cloths, the inputs into textile creation themselves don't seem all that bad, Skins seem worse, so many kinds, so easy to get. Gem gathering slows down both my tailoring and leatherworking so end up stockpiling raw materials. If I wasn't trying to do all the crafting I probably wouldn't have any storage problems.