I read a thing by a guy who tracked his own logs for a month, and his average was like 4 minutes 20 seconds. The part that stuck with me was that most of that time was just writing the date and a header, not the actual notes. Once he dropped the header his time got cut in half again. It made me realize the "setup" part is what eats the clock, not the thinking. Simple numbers like that are weirdly way more convincing than someone just telling you to try it.

Budget tools catch the weird stuff that fancy ones miss because you actually use them. I grabbed a $60 endoscope off Amazon for a prebuy on a 182 and it found a nest of mud dauber junk packed into the tailcone that the "real" inspection completely skipped. The picture was trash but I could tell something was in there, and that was enough to know I needed to look closer with my eyes. My rule now is cheap scope for finding problems and good eyes for judging them, and half the time the cheap one is the one that actually gets grabbed because it lives in the truck. The guys who laugh at cheap tools are usually the same ones who never pull them out because the good one is locked up in the shop.