[latentsea]

The amount of time spent churning on workflows and setups will offset the gains.

It's somewhat ironic the more behind the leading edge you are, the more efficient it is to make the gains eventually because you don't waste time on the micro-gain churn, and a bigger set of upgrades arrives when you get back on the leading edge.

I watched this dynamic play out so many times in the image generation space with people spending hundreds of hours crafting workflows to get around deficiencies in models, posting tutorials about it, other people spending all the time to learn those workflows. New model comes out and boom, all nullified and the churn started all over again. I eventually got sick of the churn. Batching the gains worked better.

[TeMPOraL]

Missing in your description is that at least some of that work of "people spending hundreds of hours crafting workflows to get around deficiencies in models, posting tutorials about it, other people spending all the time to learn those workflows" is exactly what informed model developers about the major problems and what solutions seem most promising. All these workarounds are organically crowd-sourcing R&D, which is arguably one of the most impressive things about whole image generation space. The community around ComfyUI is pretty much a shapeless distributed research organization.

[latentsea]

You're 100% right. I definitely witnessed and picked up on that too. Good callout.