Why is tune2fs mandatory?

[fwilhe]

Observation: I'm building images with a large root-fs (20 gig) because I really need disk space in my image. When building the image, tune2fs takes forever.

Here it is already running for half an hour:

tune2fs is called in make_reproducible_ext4 if the 'quota' option is enabled, but in makepart this option is always set, so I don't seem to have a way to disable it without making my own custom 'makepart' script.

Is this intended? Should there be an option to disable that?