[quote=@Jerkchicken]
Honestly I don't see the big deal in time taken. If actual smiths can make something decently functional on a reality tv show it really shouldn't be such a slog to make one sword as opposed to I dunno whatever an actual order for supplying a  worth of arms would take arm a squad of soldiers. Also only reason japanese swords take so long to make is because of half religious mumbo jumbo rituals and because their metal are garbage.
[/quote]

No, its not just Japanese swords, any forged weapon of decent quality takes over a day. If you look at something like Men At Arms, they will take multiple days to forge a sword or whatever, hence why it takes like two weeks for them to put out a video. Stuff like Game of Throne and the LOTR movies have [i]teams[/i] of smiths from a lot of different places working on orders at once plus they tend to only really go detailed on weapons and armor of major characters and will usually find ways to skimp out on lesser character's equipment.

There's also another major part of it that leads into a question of my own and that is technology. With modern CNC plasma cutters and motor driven grinders, you can easily cut out a frame of a sword, polish up, make it sharp and give it some fittings like a handle wrap, pommel and guard easily an with a rather high production number as you're effectively mass producing swords. However, I am assuming we have none of those kinds of technology and we can't say "oh I have magical item/spell X which does this and basically acts as modern tool Y".

Everyone has to draw and shape the blade by hand (not an easy task), shape and polish by stone grinders or some form of sandpaper-like grind paper (also not easy) and then fit everything else by hand. We can't even rely on power hammers to lessen the work, we have to do [b]everything[/b] by hand with technology that is a solid 400-500 past of our modern day.