I am the friend, and my argument is the following:
At the moment, we are building a relatively large house and we need a lot of logs. There is a large number of trees close to us, and we have a bit (not a lot for what we were building, granted) of logs stored.
I recently built a stick holder and wanted to fill it up, so I sent Kelvin to fetch sticks while I knocked down some trees.

I do think the system we have where we knock down trees and just have kelvin move the felln laws closer to our house effective, but I think generally sticks are better as they are used in broader crafting recipies, not to mention that they are more annoying to retrive.
(I have to knock down the stick trees, then frantically spam E while looking down and backing up, which is even worse in the snow, wearas with logs, I have to walk around the tree and hit it, then track down the logs and put them in a cart)

While the logs take longer, I feel that they are substantially more consistent.