Removing these timers and using in-game time to establish resets would improve the game by 90%.
It would be the opposite.
You’d have to stare at the screen waiting for the sun to rise/set to do something.
Or you’re in an activity and miss the in-game time to be somewhere to do something and you have to wait a whole other day to do it.
If you put in a mechanic like “use the bed to advance time”, you are literally just removing the timed events because you can do them at any moment, you just have to visit the bed before starting them.
No, as far as on paper this sounds like a cool mechanic, it will become obnoxious in the span of a week.
We should be able to rest or take nap during the day hours for buffs our luxurious beds provide.
Obligatory link to another good thread: [Linked] Time Gated Content needs a change
Just my two cents on the material refinement part, I don’t really mind the timers and don’t mind having a flow of putting in my materials, going out to do stuff, come back to collect and put materials in again, go out and do stuff etc.
The issue I mainly have with the system is the small inventory size (8) of how many materials we can put it at a time. I feel like as we upgrade the shops they should be able to process more, not just faster. I don’t really even use the materials to speed up refinement because I’m rarely waiting around for them to finish, I’m going out questing and whatnot for 30+ minutes and then coming back when my inventory gets full or I finish something. I would much prefer if I could dump 20 or more at a time, even if it would take longer. It’s also a bit annoying because for most town upgrades to level 3 you need 20 spruce planks, but can only process in batches of 8, at least let us do batches of 10 so it’s only 2 trips instead of 3 
I suppose maybe the intent is to buy a bunch of refinement things and put them in houses so we can process a bunch at once, but I’d rather just have bigger processing inventories on the existing ones.