Marco,
It is true that it does not take 2 yrs to make the fly rod, cane rods are very time consuming to build however. the orders are generally filled in the order that they are recieved so you are indeed waiting for your 'number to come up'. I don't know how many hours a week the shop was running but with any independent cane builder the weeks are 60 to 70 hours long.

The trend towards synthetic rods has allowd semi skilled workers to produce a great quantity of rods in an assembly line fashion.
Cane is the province of highly skilled craftsmen, skills that take at a minimum of 2 yrs to begin to blossom and full competence if often a decade of hard work away. Hiring off the street is something that simply can't be done. A craft such as that is not a good fit with todays values and goals of instant gratification. In the end the cane world is a dintinct and seperate subset of FF in general where a two yr wait from a company such as winston is viewed as quite reasonable.
splinter