There are many solutions in old hand-tool woodworking that were elegant back then, and are still more relevant today than spinning a tool at 20k RPM.
Example: when removing waste with a chisel for joinery, going cross-grain allows popping large chunks with ease, rather than route them to dust. And it's a lot of fun!
Power tools do have a use for repeatability and mass-production, which may be useful in the Notre Dame build, but I find the carpenters' approach more honorable.
As a woodworker, I get what your saying but calling the approach of using older methods as “more honorable” kind of rubs me the wrong way. It’s not like the original builders had a choice of what to use, I would bet they would choose the modern stuff if you could somehow loan them the technology from the future. Using modern tools is not antithetical to craftsmanship, it’s about the care, attention to detail, designs choices, using appropriate materials/fasteners, etc. Not saying they have to change the look at all, but they can make good and faithful reproductions with modern tools that capture the essence of what was lost.
Cheap and quick has been the carpenter's mantra since the dawn of time. One look at the inside of an old piece of furniture shows how little effort went into things that weren't readily seen.
Mortise and tenon joints are fast and easy (read: cheap and quick) to make with a chisel and hammer. You can bet carpenters of old would be using nails and screws to build all kinds of things, if they were as cheap and abundant as they are now.
As a professional furniture maker, I assure you that cutting mortises by hand is not high on anybody's list of cheap and quick things to do. At the furniture scale, we've had foot and spring powered mortiser since before we had electricity. For timber framing and similar scales, most of the waste has been bored out with manual boring machines and then the rest of the mortise is finished by hand.
Chopping is a pain in the ass, and people have been doing their best to avoid it for centuries. Hell, we're still inventing new ways to cut mortises: see the Festool Domino, which is recent enough to still be protected by patents.
Example: when removing waste with a chisel for joinery, going cross-grain allows popping large chunks with ease, rather than route them to dust. And it's a lot of fun!
Power tools do have a use for repeatability and mass-production, which may be useful in the Notre Dame build, but I find the carpenters' approach more honorable.