A friend of mine worked for the city a few years back. Here's how a bureaucracy works -

He had ten hours to finish a job that took him three hours. His boss told him to sit for seven hours (and collect pay!) because they had to use the full ten hours for that job. It was budgeted that way.

On the other hand, in one of my previous jobs I was told to do something on my own in an hour that wound up taking a co-worker and me a full weekend to accomplish. When my boss came around on the Sunday afternoon and asked when we'd be done, we said another couple of hours. He said fine, he didn't think we'd finish that quick and he was just happy to get it done before Wednesday. I said "but you told me Friday afternoon to finish it before 5" and he said "I just wanted to see if it could be done."

Because a two-person, two-day job might get finished by one person in an hour if you ask nice enough.

Of course now, years later, with its release date forgotten, OMAC is held up as some of my best work ever. (Much like how my FF, excoriated at the start, is now "second only to Lee and Kirby".)

A large part of what's wrong with the comicbook industry today is that people have almost entirely forgotten that it is an industry, a business, and that working in the field must be treated like any other job.

professional quality product that they were more than happy with

I think rabid fanboys are probably the worse 'clients' imagineable <g>.

A friend of mine worked for a magazine.  The boss was big on saying "this isn't a 40 hour a week job, you stay until the job is done."

Could things be rushed due to deadlines?  Yes, and it's usually the management's fault, like the aforementioned issue of the Fantastic Four done (completely, writing and art) in 3 days due to no one noticing that it hadn't been assigned to anyone previously.  But that doesn't mean it was a horrible book or not done professionally.  I think JB once told me he pencilled an issue of Spider-Man in 2 days, due to no one having been assigned the work until it was almost due.  And Sal Buscema made his name in comics by being able to get any book back on schedule at a moments notice.  Does Sal's work stink?  Methinks it's pretty darn good!!

An interesting note on how much things have changed -- for the worse! When MAN OF STEEL was announced, it was scheduled as a bi-weekly, six issues in three months. DC received many calls and letters from retailers expressing their doubts and concerns that the book could actually be produced on that schedule! Where are those guys now??