I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of the tech-- they think they can get exactly what they want if they are articulate enough in describing it with words.

Feed your rough mock-up to img2img (or use inpaint sketch) and you'll land much closer to where you're trying to go.

It's a power tool. It will do tedious manual work (producing art) very quickly. The difference between professionals and consumers in how they use it is that the professional asks the machine to "finish what I started," whereas the consumer tells the machine to "do all of the work for me."

Canva fits most people's needs but it only fits the needs of a narrow slice of professionals. Trying to use it for professional work takes vastly more time and effort than using a proper professional tool. LaTeX fits academic paper publisher's needs and can pump out formatted and laid-out text far quicker than someone using InDesign but you'd go crazy trying to assemble a modern magazine or high-end book. It doesn't need polish or sheen. It needs something fundamentally structurally different.

I'm holding out for an instruct-based model that will take explicit instructions, or at least layered prompts. Mutating the original prompt along with the picture (or changing the entire thing to only describe certain parts, a la inpainting) is frustrating to me.

I think what most developers don't realize is that creating media, even snazzy, captivating images, is a tiny portion of the work commercial artists and designers do beyond Fiverr or the people working at sign shops. We've got bazillions of stock photos, asset stores, etc. etc. etc. available at our fingertips at a pretty low cost... and we use them, just as we'll use AI generated images in our processes... Just not for anything that actually matters. Reducing art and design to what so many people have is nearly akin to reducing coding to how fast someone can generate code regardless of it's suitability for the purpose. I could go into Adobe Illustrator and make most of the vector art you see on the net in a few minutes. Knowing what needs to go on the screen, exactly how it needs to go on the screen, and the effects of putting it there, what it communicates and to whom, etc. etc. etc. are the hard parts. You could have a tool that would instantly translate millions of pretty images from someone's imagination in a matter of milliseconds but that's not going to make them useful for communication or anything else.

So very much of this hype is people simply assuming that they understand something that they don't. And that's why the UIs for most FOSS applications suck yet the project contributors will defend them like their own children.

Who's fault is this though? The hype is absolutely hysterical.

We already now see deepfakes (e.g. of Trump or the Pope, recently even videos) that a far beyond what we saw in the years before, indicating that the old professional tools weren't so powerful after all. Now if we extrapolate this a few years into the future...

As I mentioned in another comment, so much of this hype is based on developers assuming they understand something that they don't. I've indulged in this hubris as a developer but straddling both sides of this line has been illuminating.

https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html

This sounds all very similar to the Stable Diffusion tool chain, though probably cloud based and with a more intuitive UI on top.

Being able to quickly generate and iterate on assets is great for inspiration but pretty useless for professional output without fine-tuned, predictable, repeatable controls. These tools will simply integrate with existing professional tools until they can do it better.

Imagine the first person to make an electric saw made some automated thing that could cut the wood to make a cool looking flat pack house somewhere in the neighborhood of your specifications in 5 minutes. The caveats: while it would assemble perfectly, the actual angles of the cuts might be unpredictable... Like 40 and 50 degrees rather than 45 and 45, and the layout was never quite what you expect even if it was OK more often than not. Pros knew those were fundamentally deal breakers for professional work, and remained more professionally useful with their hand saws because they had the required precision, control, and predictability. While enthusiasts were gong crazy exploring all of the different kinds of oh-so-slightly wonky structures they could generate and predicting the end of carpentry, the old school saw companies started making circular saws, chop saws, drills, and the like. The market for handyman-built dog houses, sheds and playhouses would immediately be lost to the automated machine but I guarantee you that all consequential work would still be done by carpenters with power tools.