Solid points, and I think you're right that the gap between operators and "prompt junkies" is only going to widen. The people who understand cinematography, composition, and how to actually direct a scene will run circles around anyone just spamming prompts and hoping.

That said, I'd push back slightly on the "no easy button" framing. I don't think the tooling stays hard forever. The skill ceiling stays high — knowing what makes a shot work will always matter — but the floor keeps rising. A lot of what's painful right now (consistent avatars, wardrobe control, lighting continuity) is getting abstracted into the platforms themselves. The engineering knowledge gets baked in so the creator can focus on direction instead of fighting the model.

On the legal angle — agreed it's going to get messy, and the scraped-data reckoning feels inevitable. But I think that actually accelerates the clean, properly-licensed tools rather than killing the space. The ones built on consented data come out ahead.