I am mostly still doing that, but I built an automated sheep=shearing device a few months ago, because I go through a lot of banners for marking maps when I explore, and it seemed like it would be fairly easy and less annoying for both me and the sheep. It was harder than I thought it would be of course but once I was done I was overconfident enough to try to make an automated cactus farm that feeds right into a furnace in order to bank XP, because automatic cactus farms don't even need any redstone and I'm still always short on XP. And it's cool, when it's full I can just tap the furnace and get ~30 levels instantly without having to kill anything. That *was* very easy, but I made it small so it's slow enough that that using lava buckets or even coal is a huge waste, because you end up burning the whole thing on only one cactus. I've been just loading it up with my spare saplings, but it went through them a bit *too* fast, so then I was like, well, small automatic bamboo farm to feed the furnace and then it will just be infinite xp forever without me having to touch it at all!

So now here I am hunting the deep dark to get sculk sensors so it will know to harvest the bamboo whenever a cactus is harvested. Don't start redstoning it's dangerous.