I think this is a tradeoff all writers must face - while some are certainly capable of writing more prose of a given quality than others, there certainly exists

I think this is a tradeoff all writers must face - while some are certainly capable of writing more prose of a given quality than others, there certainly exists a tradeoff between length and quality. One can certainly write endless meandering paragraphs that seem to go nowhere, repeating the same points over and over - one just needs to look at modern 'journalism' filled with page-long articles which could be reduced to 2 sentences without any loss of information. Such a tradeoff exists in literature as well - some of the most celebrated writers of the SF/fantasy genre took forever to write a book - Tolkien, Gibson, GRRM, to name a few. While other writers, who I assume are similarly talented - King, Crichton, Sanderson, Fleming, produced a much greater volume of books over a given time, many of them admitting that they aim to publish at a consistent pace, rather than trying to write books worthy of literature's hall of fame. Reading their books I often felt that while they contained great ideas, and incredibly memorable scenes, at other times they felt workmanlike, unwilling to expand on the interesting premises they introduced, in order just to get to the finish line. Stine is just a more extreme example of that.