You get what you pay for, but sometimes you can't afford to pay for the top-shelf stuff, and other times you just don't need it. As a woodworker, you might produce the most beautiful armoire I've ever seen, but if I'm a college kid looking to store some clothing, the mass-produced cheap stuff that IKEA has is where I'm going to aim. I shouldn't be prevented from having furniture just because I didn't get it from a professional woodworker.

I use the MidJourney AI for a D&D campaign I run, and I know a lot of other DMs do it as well. The pictures aren't perfect, but they generally get my players in the mindset of what I'm looking for. Sometimes it's a picture of a swamp with glowing ethereal lights, sometimes it's a creepy looking building, and sometimes it's just a long forest road. I made an abandoned slimy water storage sewer tank room in twenty minutes when my players unexpectedly went into an abandoned sewer system to find something.

I pay $10 a month for access to the AI engine and can produce 200 drawings a month. It takes somewhere between 5 and 20 drawing iterations to guide the AI to a picture that's close-ish to what I want, and I average about 12 pictures a month that I end up using. I know other DMs that subscribe to the full service at $30 and have unlimited pictures, making dozens of iterations per specific drawing to produce crazy cool results, often including things they never would have thought of on their own.

I can have an artist produce these same drawings. For sure, their drawing will be more tailored to the specifics that I'm looking for, but each drawing will cost me somewhere between $50 and $200 depending on how detailed I want to get and how big it should be, and most will take several weeks or more to do. I personally will never pay a artists between $600-2400 a month to produce atmosphere drawings for my D&D campaign, because it just isn't feasible for me to afford that, and it's not necessary at that price point to have it in the first place. These are 'nice-to-have' cool moments, not key art.

Now, flip the script. I commissioned a campaign portrait from an artist for my adventuring party. It's a huge landscape drawing of all of the members of the campaign standing outside their newly-built headquarters in the town they've settled in. Each person is drawn as the players have described, wearing their signature armor and weapons, posing exactly as they would have done in the game. It looks exactly like I wanted it to look, and it cost me several hundred dollars. I gladly paid it in order to get the specificity I wanted, and because it's a gift to commemorate their 100th session, which is coming up soon.

I've never even attempted to produce a picture like this in MidJourney. I understand the Three Baskets limitation (and mine would be more like Fifteen Baskets), and I know this is not something within the realm of possible at this point. Even if the engine could do it, I know it will take months of iterating on the design to get me even a fraction of the way to what the artist can do on their first or second pass. Sure, it will be cheaper, but it will never be as good.