> But if you do learn, you can then render photorealistic image with nothing but pencil and paper instead of being reliant on a beefy computer running a blackbox model trained at enormous cost :)

Why do I want to avoid that reliance, other than to be smug to the nerds? And as far as general self-satisfaction, let's assume I would rather master a different skill with the time it would take.

Especially because that training cost only has to be done once, so on a per-person basis it beats learning to draw by a lot.

If you said something about flexibility and specificity of what you can create I could get behind that, but I think the arguments you're making are very unconvincing.