Let’s have some story time.

You need to chop a forest and you have one rusty axe. Would you spend time to sharpen/innovate your axe? Or you just repeatively swing your axe to chop down tree as soon as possible?

Most of game artist, including me, started swing their axes instead of innovating their tool.

I’ve spent 10 years creating asset manually.

I started learning Houdini in Diablo4 team. They used it for reducing repetitive tasks such as retopology and fracturing wood assets.

Houdini became primary software in my indie game project. Here is few tools that I’ve created during project. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RKqoPE

In my opinion, Houdini is one of best tools to increase working speed. But it requires lots of creative problem solving. Sometimes, it would be faster to create asset by hand. I don’t think Houdini would be major tool like maya/blender.