I took some time to contemplate why Square added the rest cycle, and here's what I'm thinking...

I don't think it's a matter of forcing players to rest for the sake of taking it easy and having breaks. The main reason I think that is that, frankly, setting up your workshop for the next 24 hours takes about 5 minutes. Forcing players to not use the workshop twice a week saves players around 10 minutes. That's hardly any time, so I can't imagine it justifies taking a break being the reason. Besides, we can STILL use the workshop on those days, so it's not like you're really forced to take a break. You can instead just use that time to plan out the next day you CAN use the workshop. Also, even if we WERE allowed to not have rest days, the days we'd get back would still be "time gated" by virtue of the fact that producing goods takes time.

So I think it's really just gating how quickly we get cowries, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I feel like Square was pretty intentional in choosing how quickly we can earn that currency; how much we get from the workshop each day has to meet a balance of feeling impactful without being OP. If square were to allow workshop 7 days a week but kept the same weekly cowrie income, they'd have to decrease a day's workshop income by about 29%, which would make it feel less impactful. Players wouldn't feel rewarded for their efforts, and those who weren't paying attention might think the workshop wasn't even worthwhile. On the other hand, if Square kept the daily cowrie income but allowed all 7 days, we'd be getting about 40% more cowries a week, and that would throw off how quickly we earn everything else besides Island XP (another can of worms entirely).

You could also make the argument that by having 2 less days of workshop, we go through resources less quickly. This also allows us to get away with storing less of it, which helps them feel better IMO. To me, the more of a resource you have to store, the less it feels like a real item and the more it feels like a number or piece of data. By keeping the number of rare resources that we get to use smaller, they can keep the number that we're able to earn smaller, which helps them FEEL rare and makes for a subliminally more rewarding experience... IMO.