I see no reason to complain about how difficult is new chapter and how long it takes to produce sentient goods. This scenario is much better then completing a chapter in 1,5 month and then next half year waiting for a new one. From this point of view, it's a great step forward.
Amounts of sentient goods also make portal profits a bit useless, since more time than producing settlement resources will probably take sentient goods, therefore it won't have a sense to jump through all these settlement resources and then wait, because "I have only one sentient manufactory".
Before this chapter came I was for 80% sure I will disenchant all of my portal profits in inventory, now I'm sure for 100%.