Yeah, animal husbandry is a definite no from the devs. They even stated that in one of the 1.0 dev streams. Not sure where you think they talked a lot about adding it. Maybe you are referring to players suggesting it?
Farming is hardly time consuming. I normally play two players, so yes, it is less food use than 4 players, but you would expect it to be around half. I can get by quite easily with a 6 plot farm. If I want to really load up on food, I might bump that to 9, but I usually don't unless I get an air drop with a farm bundle that has the farm plots. I can even get by quite well with 6 plots and only 2 points in LotL. With 3 points, it is incredibly easy with only 6 plots. We do a decent amount of looting, so we get a lot of the vegetables along the way, especially corn. I often can just plant potatoes and mushrooms and not need anything else (potatoes in the plots, mushrooms on the front side). When you aren't having to craft seeds too much because of a higher perk level, it is easy to just click each plot as you walk down the row and then click each again to plant. Even if that took 2 seconds each (I probably average two per second, so 2 seconds each is a lot), a 6 plot farm with mushrooms on the side is 12 clicks to harvest, 12 clicks to plant... 48 seconds. If you are slow crafting seeds, maybe you spend a minute on that, though it should take under 15 seconds. You are still less than 2 minutes every 2 hours... Under 4 minutes for 4 people compared to my 2 people. The reality is that I can harvest and replant 9 plots with mushrooms on the side in under 15 seconds without even trying.
Now, if we ignore that it takes basically no time unless you feel the need to have a huge farm for some reason, the next issue is food amounts. With just 6 plots, I can easily feed 2 people. With 12, you should easily feed 4. If you want to feed more, you just add more plots. If you want to harvest more frequently, you plant at different times, though there isn't any reason to do that. Farming has no actual limit to how much you can produce other than space for the farm. That means you can already easily have an overabundance of cooked food with really little effort. Often, it is the animal fat that slows cooking down more than crops. What we don't need is to increase the speed of farming. It is already fast enough. We don't need it to act like dew collectors do now, where you can get so much water so quickly with the mods installed that you actually have to stop collecting water before very long unless you are crafting a ton of stuff that needs glue. Making farming the same isn't a good option. I already stop farming at a certain point because I have so much food made.
What you want is to add more stuff to complicate farming because you want it to be faster, when it really isn't needed. Farming used to be more complicated and some people did like that, but most people just want to get it done and go on about their business without extra work, including crafting extra stuff to speed it up.
Definitely not worth adding. And there are many other things I would like to see first even if they did add it.
What you suggest sounds fine for a mod, just not for vanilla. I think the only thing I might suggest they change is to make the angles glass roof panels that are clearly intended at least partly for greenhouses is to make them count as open air for purposes of farming so that you could place plots into a greenhouse structure is you wanted that look without having to leave an opening so things will grow. Maybe that is already a thing (I haven't tried), but if not, I think that would be nice.