I think it's especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started

I think it's especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started and people making professional quality works in said area has gone down significantly too. For instance, my go to example are video game mods and ROM hacks. In the olden days, these communities grew quite slowly, and it took a fair amount of time for people to get to understand the workings of a new game's engine and how it could be built upon. And you can see this if you look at Super Mario 64. In it early days, mods were really basic, and even the fanciest ones looked super primitive by today's standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U It then took years to go from stuff like that to more advanced original game mods like Super Mario 64 Star Road, and even longer before ASM coding became something many people understood and used for custom enemies, bosses, gimmicks, etc (like in Kaze Emanuar's current works). Now contrast to Super Mario Odyssey. It took just months for mods to get made for that game, and under a year for fancy looking ones like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg And even that's a slower example. Since then, we've gone from seeing modding scenes take years to develop, to seeing them a week or two after release, to in some cases seeing mods getting made BEFORE the game officially hit store shelves altogether. Seriously, Smash Bros Ultimate got mods before the game was available to buy, all based on leaked copies posted online. Outside of games, same thing happens in web development too. New framework pops up, professional looking sites/apps/whatever get made in the first week. It's gotten to the point that those jokes about looking for 'rockstar ninjas in [new programming language here]' may not be jokes anymore. But yeah, the quality baseline goes up significantly quicker now.