I must have done something drastically different than other people starting out. If only I could remember what it was, haha! As a total beginner, with no previous cities (not counting the roughly week and a half I played several years ago), I got through chapter 1 in 3 days, and chapter 2 in 10 days, so I was in chapter 3 in about two weeks. I didn't have a good fellowship feeding me stuff, in fact, I didn't have a fellowship at all for the first week or so because I wasn't sure whether I would keep playing and then the first fellowship I joined was almost all inactive players, so almost a month of basically no fellowship.
All that to say...I know from watching my mom start playing recently that it can be very slow, but based on my experience, it doesn't have to be? I think it must depend on doing things the right way (whatever that is) the first couple of days, and I lucked into it when I started. I know I stopped following the quests pretty quickly, and I never had as many manufactories, houses, or workshops as they told you to build. I also did the absolute minimum of scouting to get into the next chapter. Other than that, I'm not sure what would make the difference.