Once you’ve actually done thousands of images, your criteria for judging tools completely changes. Back in the day, I’d pick tools based on how stunning the output was, but now I only care about three things: batch stability, how easy it is to revise, and the cost per image in cents.
Stunning doesn’t matter—clients want twenty images with consistent style and the ability to make edits overnight. I dropped a tool that had amazing output quality just because it couldn’t lock the seed for fine-tuning; changing a button meant re-rolling the whole image.
Once you scale up production, controllability trumps image quality—that’s the reality forced by tight deadlines.