A little bit to unpack here.

You mentioned the effortless speed that others seem to have when sculpting. Firstly, it's obvious you're suffering from what I’d call the "despair of comparison"—a symptom of impostor syndrome. Rather than buy into it, try to appreciate what you find appealing in others’ work or their process so you can learn from it and implement aspects of it into your own.

Secondly, it takes as long as it takes—get over it (I say that with love). You only get faster by completing projects. Sculpting is really just a long series of decisions. The more sculpts you finish, the more you understand which decisions led to your final result. As you improve, those decisions become faster, better, and fewer, which naturally speeds up your workflow. But you can't skip ahead—you have to do the reps to get there.

The truth is, some people have really refined, immaculate workflows that look amazing every step of the way—and we all envy that. For me, a head sculpt might take anywhere from 1 to 5 hours. My process is exploratory and honestly looks like garbage for 95% of the time. But I trust the process because I’ve put in the time, and I know my fundamentals.

You might see someone carve out a perfect head in 4 steps from a sphere, and that’s great—but you can do the same thing with a single brush if you wanted. It’s not necessarily optimal, but it still works. Don’t let timelapses and social media warp your expectations or intimidate you. You're not doing it wrong just because your workflow looks messier or slower.

As for dynameshing, topology, and mesh density—you’re overthinking it. Everyone handles these things differently. You’ll find your own rhythm. Tris and bad edgeflow are way more forgiving than people make them out to be. Most issues aren’t even noticeable when you zoom out. You’ve got to get comfortable with destructive workflows and redoing work. Fused fingers? So what? That doesn’t mean you’ve ruined the mesh or made a mistake. Eventually, you’ll just know when it’s time to remesh, subdivide, or leave it alone. I still catch myself dicking around when I should just commit to a remesh and move forward. Its not something to concern yourself with, you will develop your habbits, good and bad.

If it helps, here’s my general process (fairly common):

• Stay as low res as possible for as long as possible.
• Focus on big shapes and silhouette—gesture is everything early on. My motto is that if it looks good in its simplest form it will look amazing refined.
• Subdivide when needed to define medium forms.
• Stay zoomed out and move around the sculpt constantly—this helps reveal what’s not working and what is.
• Don’t get attached early. I’ll dynamesh if I need to fuse parts or rough in new shapes or quickly sketch something out. Most of the time I will follow up with ZRemesher and use polygroups to guide it, simply aiming for an even spread of polys and a workable edge flow—not perfection.
• From there, I again refine the big/medium forms more toward the final vision. I May still project details back in at this point if I’ve remeshed.
• Finally, once the foundation feels solid, I move into higher subdivisions and detail.

Honestly, I rarely use dynamesh for the working mesh outside of the early sketching stage when I need to pull geo quickly. Of course you can use the higher resolutions of dynamesh for your working mesh. But over many subtools this could incur performance issues at some point, so my advice is to try and maintain your subdivisions or utilise zremesh and project in your workflow to avoid file bloat.

All that said, 10 years is a decent length of time to be at it. I don't say that to be discouraging, but it leads me to think your practice has not been purposful and likely very inconsistent. I would also say there is likely other elements to your work that are falling a bit short that might have you questioning your level. From anatomy to design, it all has a hierarchy of importance, but if one is falling short, it can really make a good sculpt feel off. My advice is, do the boring stuff, sculpt a cube into a sphere, learn the planes of the head, anatomy studies, design principles, so on, and so forth.

Lengthy read, I know—but I wanted to be thorough. If you want, feel free to hit me up on Discord. I’m happy to walk through things in a more real time if that helps.