I mean, when it takes about a month for your new ship to be built, you might as well try to do something, right?

At least at my table downtime hasn't been that hard to come across, I am a more sandbox style DM so downtime is how much time and money players are willing to spend, and in the games I am a player in we have had a couple projects that just took an extended period of time, the game that is currently active we are in a bit of a bind right now but before that we all had day jobs in a city and obligations to fulfill, downtime was part of the draw during that time.