This is a very bad idea IMO because the problem would be longer "inactive" or "non playing" timers.
So instead of 3s to 10s actions you would have 15s to 50s actions. Making it less active playing by a factor of 5. (Even though its boring at least you do something).
I don't think the clicking per say is the problem, its the lack of thought/activity that is the problem. I think to be honest it could take 10x more actions to get to max and people would be find with it IF it wasn't so boring. There are other systems on the market in other games that give more thought behind how to craft and even make it faster/slower/better based on how you do the action of the craft itself, like that Vanguard game. I'm not saying change it that much because that would be a major overhaul to the game.
About theissue, I think balancing the skills/action weight is the way to fix this. I briefly touched this saying it needs balancing but pretty much he needs to go through each skill and put more thought/weight/value into how hard mats/tools/skills are to train or get. It's a large task that needs to be done, no real way of getting around it. He also doesn't have to do it all at once. Take it a skill or 2 at a time and put thoughts into how he wants them.A to B to get C grind for exp points
Example:
Bonecrafting is prolly the fastest skill in crafting to level. However, bones were rare/hard to get. Now that we get up to 8x more bones per kill, and animals being easier to kill and more animals in the game, this needs to be looked at again. Balanced.
Example:
Tailoring used to take a long time to level, because the recipes for higher tailoring were capped at 35 skill (at least the ones that were easy to get the mats for)
Now we have master cloth armor, which requires 90+ skill to make. Making it much faster now than before, with cloth mats being pretty easy to get means its a cheap easy way to level tailoring with fewer actions than before.
Example:
Combat skills used to be much easier than now. Now we can't train on other players (I'm only considering the PVE server because PVP server is dead) so now the number of actions and the stat gain from killing mutants/animals is very very slow and takes a long time, pretty much forcing players to use green points to level it.