Hi Tom,
thanks again, I am happy to hear this production took you on a small Symphonie fantastique-Odyssey, as this work truly stands up to its title.
The time I would need now for a thoroughly polished version is much, much less then what one would imagine it would have to be when listening to the piece. Only two years ago I wouldn't have thought that completing such a production in the time I completed it in was even remotely possible. This is a very important factor to understand - it is not just your skills which improve with (meaningful) practice, after you have achieved a certain critical point your speed increases dramatically as well.
In other words, one shouldn't believe it takes weeks to complete this. It doesn't. You'll need weeks for the first (or even the second) polished production you do, but after you have amassed a critical amount of experience, the amount of time you need for a similar project will collapse dramatically.
This is (of course) much more true of the sound aspect, as you can save once polished setups and use them again any time you want, with just little additional tweaking if you want to adjust something to the new project. However, setting up the sound aspect took me a very, very long time at first, as I had to learn a lot through trial and error method (I have no proper training in audio engineering). The amount of time needed to make a completely new sound setup is for me much smaller today, but it would still consume a decent portion of worktime on a production for which a new sound setup has to be built from scratch.