> a much higher skill ceiling.

As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting.

Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...

You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.

A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.

And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.

I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night.

I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.