This what I find frightening about the landscape we're moving into. When the emphasis becomes on the volume of your content and how fast it can be produced, the overall artistic output of a culture suffers because there's no system to support artists doing 'deep work'.
So it's difficult to agree with your point that increasing standards and a larger pool of candidates create more quality. In my experience, quality artistic output is a time sink that arises from repeatedly generating and refining concepts and the media itself.
Volume of your content is an emphasis only while the revenue is low but still reasonable to work for, which is at best a phase of transition. As the revenue goes to zero and becomes insignificant (which is already the case for many art forms), or even becomes negative (i.e. authors paying in effort or money to attract attention to a free product), there is no emphasis on the volume of your content - the emphasis is on building something that's good enough to get attention despite an overwhelming supply of free alternatives, and that barrier is getting higher and higher. The people that break above that standard do invest quality deep work and a time sink, even despite a lack of system to fund most of them. Yes, funding them would likely help - but as current reality shows, it's not strictly necessary, the supply of good art anyway outstrips the availability of attention.
So it's difficult to agree with your point that increasing standards and a larger pool of candidates create more quality. In my experience, quality artistic output is a time sink that arises from repeatedly generating and refining concepts and the media itself.
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