Quote - > Quote - Because there's a tradeoff in quality vs quantity that has to be considered.

It's one thing if you can devote a lot of time to that one image to get it juuust right. It's quite another when you have to put out mulltiple images in a restricted timeframe and simply don't have the time to focus to make each one as perfect as you possibly can.

To use examples from other media, you don't expect an SF or fantasy weekly TV series to have the same quality of special effects as a movie in the same setting: they don't have the same budget, and more importantly they can't spend a year doing the SFX for a single episode. The cheap-ass monster Supershark vs Snotopus movies on SyFy have laughable effects, but that's what the budget and time allows (not to mention the number of people working on it and the infrastructure they have).

I know artists who do Poser/DAZ work for various webcomics and such who can do absolutely beautiful work, but you wouldn't know it from the webcomic because they can't spend the time on it. If it takes two days to set up and render one image to the quality they have the skill to do (assuming it isnt' a full-time job and they're doing it in their otherwise free time), but you need to produce 15 or so images a week, something's gotta give.

It's something a lot of people doing professional 3D portfolios often miss. Sure, that's a beautiful piece of modelling and texturing and lighting and rendering that took you a month to do. Show me what you can get done in three days, because for a lot (most?) professional work, that's a more realistic type of thing you're going to face.

I'll give you ALL this as a valid retort.  You make good points.  Then I ask, is nostril glow or inner-mouth glow so hard to fix?  Is it asking too much to render WITH shadows turned on, or learn how to render with AO, at the very least, to make the render look a little more polished?  These are the kinds of things I see very often when I come across a Poser comic, or illustrated story, or animation short.  If you have a great story, why not find someone to illustrate it for you, if you don't have the time to learn or care enough to create halfway decent graphics to go along with it?

I also know of several "pro" artists who can create decent looking rendered scenes in just a few hours, from scratch.  They may use stock objects, but usually they are stock they they themselves created, for that purpose.  It's a misnomer that all pro stuff created from scratch takes months to do.  No the case, except for when you're creating perfectionist pieces for your demo reel, or for CGTalk galleries.

We recently had a modelling challenge here on Rosity in the Max forum, in which we were to model one object per day, for 7 days.  The objects weren't simple for the most part.  We didn't have to uv unwrap, or any of that, but most of us got them done in just a couple hours, so just saying it's possible to do halfway decent work in short amount of time, have fun, and learn in the process.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.