I agree with you on this. All the guys need to do is round up some scrap and thread 25 to 50 pieces. By the time you go through that many repetitions your hand to eye coordination starts to be close to automatic like shooting skeet or hitting a baseball.
I hear the stories about so many gunsmiths taking a half a day to a day to thread and fit a rifle barrel and laugh.
Assuming you do not have to rework or blue print an action threading a barrel takes very little time. After you have cut a lot of threads you can judge how deep the thread is by how sharp the crests of the thread are.
I will admit to one thing though. I learned to thread on an old 1920s Pratt and Whitney tool room lathe with bronze headstock bearings. It was old and worn and I could not take heavy cuts so I had to make lots of shallow passes. This lathe was designed for lots of threading because it had a threading cross slide built into the normal cross slide. This smaller cross slide had a sleeve around the cross slide screw that had a helical slot that pulled the tool back about 1" for 1/2 turn of the cross slide knob. Each of the 2 cross slides could be locked independently.
To cut threads I locked the normal cross slide and unlocked the thread cutting cross slide. When I pulled the tool out at the end of a cut the tool came out about 50 times faster than a normal cross slide.
I started running a lathe in a shop too cheap to buy much carbide so I also learned to grind my own tool bits. I think that is a lost art now.
I have to pass on one other observation. While working my way through college I worked one summer in a half baked shop that made some tools for JC Whitney. The equipment in that shop was a collection of junkers and clunkers that had been sold off from other businesses. One of the machines was a Brown and Sharp single spindle automatic screw machine.
Since a turning machine is a turning machine I was put on the Brown and Sharp to run a lot of acme thread nuts for a front end coil spring compressor. Once set up the machine would run unattended for a long period of time.
Somewhere that machine had the original motor and controls replaced.
There was a common frame size electric motor connected to a 1950s Chevrolet 3 speed standard transmission on top of the headstock. The output shaft from the transmission drove the machine. My first old Chevy had the same exact transmission so I knew how to shift it using the 2 side levers without being shown how.