Our kids elementary school (Germany) recently voiced concerns that pupils - especially boys - do not fulfill the self defined learning tasks in the expected time..
There may be no upper boundary to how much out of touch educators can be.
Wasn't that the OPs argument?
Companies have been building tunnel after tunnel [..] and optimized the process. No one had tried to large scale industrialize satellite + space launcher production before.
E-Ship 1 exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1
They report fuel savings up to 25%, so it may be viable for some ships types and voyages. But a long way from propelling the whole ship.
It's a Ro Ro ship for rolling cargo. Not a big one and without the additional car decks an ocean going Ro Ro ship typically has, but for what it is the cargo capacity is reasonable.
A "normal" ocean-going Ro Ro ship would be over 200m long and quite a bit higher. Typically only the lowest deck can carry trucks and heavy loads and the upper decks carry cars. Their solution of only having the heavy load deck is sensible since they need a low center of gravity to counteract the sails and any added deck height hurts the sailing characteristics.
With all that said, there is not much to scale it up. They could make it a bit longer but probably mostly easily: risk in bad weather, structural integrity demands from the added sails and all that may quickly add up.