After having given it some thought, you make a good point - it does make the process of farming more active than passive, even if just for a comparatively small amount each week. It's busywork, but it's busywork I'm okay with since combat makes up a pretty hefty chunk of the game and a nice spot of farm management helps break it up.
Personally I'd really prefer to get more seeds outright than crops, then having to spend more time counting beans and crafting kernels to replant the fields, but I understand it's meant to help reward smaller "plant whatever" gardens.
Hell, if we're really gonna go whole-hog with farming investments, maybe auto-regrowth could even be reintroduced later on through fancy, expensive-in-materials-and/or-dukes "hydroponics planter" blocks for endgame farming sort of like how solar is for electrical generation. "Yeah, you want to be a lazy farmer so bad? Invest in it." I think that could work.