The real value is in the quality of the ideas, not in time spent. Nobody cares wheter you've spent 15mins or 100hrs on a song. All listeners care about is if the song touches them and can mean something to them.

You can write a lyric in 30mins, but you can also work out music for a song in that amount of time. When you're a musician, you know the tools, have a workaround and can work out music just as fast.

Tracking and mixing a song is often just as fast. Once you have the drums down. You can record bass, 2-3 layers of guitar and additional stuff in an hour, and if your recording software is set up with templates, mixing won't take you longer. For a demo anyway.

Any DIY musician knows this. It's all about setting up your studio to a fast workflow. So, I think the producer musician is a bit canonized in this thread.

Music is really not rocket science, and with the tools available, even less so.

What you can't expect to do, no matter how virtuos you are, is to get quality ideas on the fly. Great lyricists collects ideas, writes on a daily basis, sketch out lyrics and finetune them untill they stand out compared to anything in the genre they write in. Trouble is, a lot of the how-to of writing is mental, and won't get appreciated as fast as a cool guitar lick. But both the magical and the tangiable is needed for songwriters to reach a great song.

Again, artists can do what they want, because they already have carte blance, and only have to worry about what they desire to express/ marketability. Songwriters have to come up with ideas so universal that everybody loves them. That's why the quality of ideas is crucial.