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I would love Paizo input on this, I feel like the APG being so fleshed out means there will be updates for other sections of the game, and I have my fingers crossed for some sort of crafting compendium.

I have deduced a single game-mechanic reason for 4-day preliminary period. Without the delay, a highly-skilled crafter could fish for a Critical Success.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this inbetween work and other games because I couldn't quite put my finger on what bothered me about it. Something felt wrong and I just realized what it was. The crafting day minimums don't actually need to exist to stop crit fishing, because half of the gold cost is spent -before- you roll. For every attempt you are burning half the gold cost, so if you attempt it even twice, you've burnt as much money as finishing it immediately would have been. The craft day minimums make sense for a system that allows you to gather materials, but the core crafting rules don't have that option in the first place. Using the 4-day preliminary for items that the GM has ruled can be crafted for free by substituting material gathering is fine, but that's not standard and this system of using 2 methods (gold cost -and- 4 day minimum) to break people who abuse crafting is putting even more strain than necessary on GMs who want to try and run this with rules as writ.

Also, arrows are one of the items we're told can be made in batches.

Arrows are made in batches of 10... per 4 days or more spent crafting. Consumable items are produced at 4 per craft session, these effects do not stack on each other as writ. Deciding to finish a single crafting session later doesn't address the major glaring issue involved with producing ammunition as a whole. It still takes 4 initial days to produce a single batch of 10 arrows, which your ranger will probably burn through in less than 2 combats. This lack of foresight in the core crafting rules makes Rangers and any bow wielding party members a near liability in any story situation where arrows aren't readily available from an outside source, especially in places like deep jungle where you are significantly more likely to find wildlife to hunt rather than enemies with bows, and telling the party you need them to hex crawl all the way back to a village for arrows will cause division amongst the party.

If you're playing PFS, there are Boons that can lessen or eliminate the 4-day requirement, extend your days of Downtime between adventures so you can save more on Crafting, and swap out skills so that you can craft using skills like Nature or Herbalism Lore.

If you're not playing PFS, talk with your GM about doing something similar.

I'm about to start up a homebrew PF2 Campaign and one of my players wants to craft poisons, and harvest materials from venomous creatures. I'll be setting a Survival DC based on the CR of the creature to "harvest" the venom as part of its "treasure bundle" that can then go towards the crafting materials.

The rules are fairly robust to allow GMs to accommodate their players.

2 things about this, and a personal aside.

First, thank you for information about the PFS boons, what I genuinely don't understand is why that function isn't in the core rules under any section about reputation or character growth. It feels like they know it's obnoxious to adhere to those rules and patchworked a fix in PFS.

Second, harvesting food, gold, and valuable materials from monsters feels like something that should already exist but, again, partially doesn't. Procuring food during exploration activities is fleshed out, acquiring malaria because your tent wasn't made to withstand mosquitos in a jungle exists, but stripping monsters of material to craft weapons, armor, or ammunition is weirdly absent. I will defer to another example of absurd craft times being arrows. Heaven forbid you forgot to stock up before you went diving through the jungle, and good luck getting more than a couple bundles out of your crafter before it's been over a week and everyone's itching to get a move on. Hope those 20 arrows last you through all of the encounters you'll hit on your hex crawl of sadness. A simple, non magical item that might take a day to gather resources for, and another day of piecing together at most, but definitely not four minimum or longer if you need to save your silver pieces.

Now for the personal aside. My GM wants to run this new system as close to the book as possible, with errata, to understand the function of the core game before making wild adjustments to core rules. The fact that the rules offer no alternatives to the function of crafting, while almost every other skill has a myriad of different executions, feels like anyone with an interest in making things got thrown under the bus. Even saving throws have 2 different ways they operate, some effects using a flat check against your save DC, while others ask you to pray to the dice gods to save you with a rolled saving throw. The system has invariably evolved in many ways, but crafting feels like it took a massive step backwards from PF1. That's not to say I don't appreciate being able to hammer out a godly level magical item in only 4 days, but again, it feels like the system was designed for people to exclusively craft items of their own level for themselves or their party. Meanwhile, you can earn yourself an entire level with diplomacy in an adventure path. Like reading off of the same page number in 2 different books so some things happen to coincide, but mostly it feels cobbled together.

I would like to pre-empt this post by pointing out that I completely understand why items that have inherent magical properties require the rules as writ in gold cost and time. Incorporating magical elements into crafting of any kind will invariably take longer and cost money in materials or expertise from someone who can tell you "not like that, Idiot, you'll blow us all up."

With that said, I do not understand why mundane items, especially things like simple weapons, require a full 4 days and 100% gold cost for an expert or legendary crafter.

My arguement is three-fold. Time. For a barely trained or master crafter I could understand basic items to take a fair amount of time, however it is horribly impractical that an expert or legendary crafter is incapable of mounting a shaft to a spearhead in a day, even after acquiring raw materials. If you went to a proper weaponsmith as said a spear should take 4 days, they would laugh in your face. If I play a 15th level Dwarven Paladin of Torag, who wants to spread the good word of Torag by crafting defensive weaponry for a town on the verge of being assaulted, it makes no practical sense that it should take me a minimum of 4 days to outfit a single person with a simple weapon. I would have stood better time to make them something absurdly magical far beyond their capabilities to wield and sent them off to fight as a singular hero to the town... who is then immediately overrun by enemies and killed, because a horde of simple weapons would have served a better purpose.

The second part of my arguement, Cost. My Dwarven Paladin of Torag notices the local town has a mineshaft with raw ore to make steel, and lumber for cutting down to make perfect spear shafts... Who am I paying money to for crafting the spear? Getting all the raw material myself I expect to take time, but where do my gold and silver coins go if I have everything I need and the Artisans tools of both woodworking and metalworking? Acquiring materials naturally and using them to create is the hallmark of a professional crafter, as an adventurer my character carries tools with him, and as a player I know exactly how to create without spending a single copper, it seems strange that procuring food is well detailed but procuring special material for crafting isn't even a whisper mentioned in the core rulebook.

The third and final part of this fairly long winded argument, Collaboration. If I know that another character is capable of crafting a portion of a weapon, and I'm capable of creating the other portion, why is collaboration a circumstance bonus instead of a much more functional reduction in time, the way manufacturing works normally? When you attempt to build an item of many complex parts across many craftsmen, you don't wait individually for each piece to be done before another is started, you both work for less time to complete the same amount of work. If my Dwarven Paladin is accompanied by another crafter who would like to aid in my endeavour, they can either craft alone and produce a second piece of equipment in the same time, or... aid me in producing one piece with a circumstance bonus irrelevant to my overwhelming legendary crafting ability, in exactly the same time. A second example, in one of the first adventure paths, players can find themselves in possession of a suitable place for crafting. There is also a fairly deep staircase the leads to an open cavern and a forest nearby. As a player I would like to start a logging and mining group using paid labor to procure raw material and then a team of crafters to produce non-magical weapons to outfit the town and tower. I would understand paying labor, but where am I spending money on making the item, and again, why does my team of crafters take 4 days on a single item? For the sake of story having a team of dwarves singing hymns to Torag as they craft weapons and armor for the local garrison sounds epic, but the rules as writ make those dwarves, and my character, sound like bumbling children that need an absurd amount of time to do the most basic of things.

In essence, for crafting, I feel as if the rules were created for selfish makers to craft only the best of items for themselves and maybe their team or companions, but not much thought was given to characters built around crafting generously by simplifying the process of crafting to an assembly line process for ease of cost and time.