Is the slow speed of trees to grow on purpose?

[paramat]

> I only hope that this unbearably slow rate was unintentional.

See my linked work on this, it was intentional in that we trusted a statistcal analysis that was carefully done, but my tests later showed a very significant slowdown, so i made it equivalent.

> because some of the recent updates (in 0.4.15 particularly) just make little sense, at least from a player perspective.

That's your personal opinion.
All dev work is openly discussed at Github so you can make your objections. Even after it has been done you can open issues to explain why you think something is wrong (and we encourage it as mistakes are made, such as this one).

Certainly, generally, devs play less than players, but obviously because they are working hard on dev. But i get the impression half of devs play regularly. Maybe not as many hours, as they are more likely to be adults who have less spare time than players, who are more likely to be teenagers or younger.
Devs may be somewhat more interested in dev than playing, which is no bad thing as long as they listen to players opinions (which they do).

I'll make an analogy of an aircraft engineer who is not also a pilot, does that mean they are not suitable to be an engineer? Most aircraft engineers are not pilots. Many pilots do not have the same level of understanding of the aircraft the engineer does.

> None, I guess.

Your guess is wrong, and why make a statement if it is a guess, it's just negativity based on no evidence.

[paramat]

Please let me know if the new method of growing crops has significantly slowed down their growth, the same method was used as was used for trees, however there seems to be no complaints.