There was an incredible amount of investment into high-speed programmable power looms, and there were a number of innovations (later rediscovered by computer architects) targeted at 'card-saving techniques' to reduce the labor required to card-punch the designs, and to reduce the down-time of the looms. 'Double Data Rate' card readers (with a design interleaved on two chains running at half frequency), SIMD-style one-reader/many-loom setups, 'cross-border' looms that switched between two separate card loops just like a 'branch' instruction, machines to copy chains of punch cards.
What you're saying might have been true in the 18th century or earlier, but things were highly mechanized by the 19th century, and there was a lot of motivation to keep the big expensive looms highly utilized and amortize investment in punch card sets across lots of production runs.
What you're saying might have been true in the 18th century or earlier, but things were highly mechanized by the 19th century, and there was a lot of motivation to keep the big expensive looms highly utilized and amortize investment in punch card sets across lots of production runs.