>>527862678
Personally, I think there's a kind of balance to be struck. Wax on wax off and all that jazz, but past a certain point you won't really benefit any from doing the same exact "hand gripping a handle" hand posing or "basic sitting posture" lower body posing for the 30th time. Ironically, it'll probably just get in the way of learning other skills as you waste your finite motivation on doing the tedious parts over and over again. I think it's fine to hoof it on your own for a bit, but IMO it's also good to keep the human element of motivation in mind. The biggest bottleneck for most people will simply be time spent, and if you need to make more pretty pictures to keep that motivation flowing then optimizing that process may result in more net progression for you overall.

I prescribe to what I'd just call working smart personally, I never use full premades (mostly because 90% of them don't work for Hrothgar) but rather I frankenstein together a very rough draft using partial import features from anything I have. Pose downloaded/past poses/vanilla emotes and then tune from there. Hands are the big thing I save files explicitly for (I have a bunch of duplicate pose files just named for their hands) but I'll pull other parts from any files I can think of to start with. It usually saves me a lot of time, and also helps me start considering things like lighting or location or other factors without having to get hours deep into working on it just to realize it's a bust.