I think a big trap newbies fall into is thinking that pros must have mastered a lot of time saving techniques, so they skimp on effort and assume that when they reach a certain level, or get certain expensive gear, that suddenly they'll be making really polished pages with only the same level of effort they're putting in now.
The truth is, as you get more practised, you do certainly get a bit faster at drawing and writing things that are decent quality, and you learn about where to best spend and spare on detail to get a polished look, and you'll learn some shortcuts.... but its usually offset by the realisation that actually, most pros get that polished look and feel by just working really, really hard. They don't skimp at the inking stage and have floppy, scruffy lines, they don't skimp on their storyboarding and just have the same shot of the characters standing face-on from the waist up every panel, they don't skimp on the writing and just kinda make everything up as they go without any planning, they don't just drop a standard oval tool and put default arial font text in it. Oh and most pros really think about their specs too, like if they want to go to print, they probably thought of that before they even started and made their pages to print specs with bleed before chopping them up for longscroll format.
Basically... being a comicker is hard work, and while it's less hard work if you're making gag strips, that side of things is massively competitive due to how accessible it is, so it still requires pretty high polish and really fresh, funny jokes and a strong unique gimmick to stand out there.
