Are you sure they're amateurs, not professionals don't it for fun (/pro boner/!?!).

I meant something a little different. Any random dude with a random mid-level PC can download the software and produce amazing results without any special hardware or knowledge. I recommend you to try it out for yourself.

Was there a huge progress made since news about deepfakes broke early this year?

Around March/April this year, I actually did download the TensorFlow toolkit for face transfer that was used by /r/deepfakes people and tested it out (there were samples of photos of politicians included); the results were, at best, worse that I could do in 2 minutes in Gimp. Maybe they could get better if I had an expensive GPU farm at my disposal, but I'm pretty doubtful - given that the news died down pretty quickly, and no reasonable-quality faked pictures or videos were reported ever since.

It's more about experimenting with your training data and other configuration. What I've heard, getting great results takes time - but it's possible. Most of the focus of the community is on porn, so I can imagine not so many journalists are checking the newest results and reporting about them.