> The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery.

Doing woodworking with neolithic tools, with 1700's era tools, with WW1 era tools, or with modern power tools satisfies all of these requirements. It takes time, it requires skill and mastery in all cases. OP is saying that woodworking with power tools doesn't qualify in this regard, which is false and I find very annoying and I consider gate-keeping.

I'm not saying Rex is recommending a Saw Stop, I'm saying when he has to get work done he uses whatever tool he thinks is the right one for the job.

> I think using a hammer and chisel or hand saw to cut a straight edge is more physically difficult and demanding than doing the same with a table saw

Well of course it is. Building things from wood isn't the same as the steps to do it. You can chew the wood with your teeth and if you are skilled you will end up with a piece of furniture that will last generations, or you can use a table saw and build something that falls apart in an hour. And vice-versa. Woodworking is building things out of wood. Being better at woodworking means you build better things of the wood, not being more impressive when people watch the video of how it was made, which doesn't exist and nobody wants to see. If you are a professional you also have to worry about building good things efficiently (in time and other resources like materials and wear on tools). If you are not a professional you are free to be inefficient but that just means you are measured entirely by the end result. If one way or the other is a more fun path for you to take then of course do it that way, whether it's power tools or not, but if your goal is just to spend time sweating over wood without worrying about the quality of the final product we fundamentally don't agree on what the point is. Crawling is more physically demanding than walking, and crab walking is harder than crawling, and rolling is harder and more physically demanding than crab walking, and dragging yourself by your teeth without using your arms or legs is harder still. Why do you still walk?

To quote Kenny Powers, “I play real sports. Not trying to be the best at exercising.”

To build something as 'simple' as a stool or a table you have to understand how the wood will move, how the forces will be applied to the piece in years (hopefully decades) of use and how it will wear or weather, how to make it so that wearing doesn't degrade or ruin the piece, how to build it to be strong when resisting those forces but not overbuilding it so that it is needlessly heavy or wastes wood or is ugly as a result. You have to make something that will be attractive and somewhat stylish, at least to someone's idea of what is attractive and stylish. Woodworking isn't cutting a straight cut, it's building furniture that serves it's owner for a very long time and is loved and passed on through time. It's building the things that Rex finds and shows us why they have held up and are still being used 100 or 200 years later, and that people will want to have in their possession at all. Who cares how you cut the boards? How is that even a consideration? Do it how you want, it couldn't matter less and nobody should care (and nobody does).

Okay, much of what you say is relevant to the professional woodworker. But the OP was not discussing the professional woodworker and "gatekeeping" as an accusation is not relevant to the professional woodworker. No one is denying that for the actual industry, for the objective of actually producing accurate, reliable, long-lasting furniture, power tools are the superior choice.

>Who cares how you cut the boards?

Everyone who enjoys the feeling of satisfaction in shaping wood with more limited tools. The kind of hobbyist who does this for fun. People, presumably, like the OP given his other comments. No, they are not "playing real sports" - they're having fun. And again, for that express and specific purpose, recommending hand tools over heavy automation makes sense. The expectation or even recommendation that a hobbyist should invest a thousand dollars into a table saw, router, planer, dust collector, etc. acts as much more serious gatekeeping in that it makes the practice of woodworking seem a lot more formidable than it is.

In addition to all the baseline skills that you pointed out that everyone who shapes wood will have to learn, the OP is also recommending a way of working that makes you interact with the wood more slowly and much more physically than using a power tool. What they said is true; cutting a straight, clean edge with a saw is a more difficult skill than doing the same thing with a power tool. The difficulty, as they explicitly noted, is the entire point. To find a skill that you very obviously don't have and learn to live with your mistakes as you improve.

I'm only going this far because you said, first of all, that "it doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools" and second that "even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes." Neither of those statements are, as far as I can tell, true, and the second especially would strongly discourage a lot of people from starting the hobby. Tell me that I need potentially a thousand dollars' worth of heavy, dangerous equipment and a large dedicated space to use them in, and I will probably conclude that the hobby isn't for me. But a small tote's worth of hand tools and a corner of a room? I can work with that!

Crawling is more difficult than walking though. Why isn't it valuable to build skill as a crawler?

I'm not suggesting you should buy lots of expensive power tools instead of a cheap saw. I'm saying that having to work with a cheap saw is just worse in every way, there's no spiritual insight to be gained, it's just a worse tool you are using because you prefer not to to or can't obtain a better tool. The fact that people fetishize it doesn't make it any different than digging the hole for a pool with a shovel instead of a backhoe, or moving a couch by yourself instead of with a friend. The swimming pool isn't a better pool in the end, and the couch doesn't transform into some kind of special couch.