The hours involved, plus the fact that my PC is effectively useless during those hours...
whatever such a service would cost, I'm sure would amount to "how much do you REALLY care about that tape/disc?"

Even if I'm only capturing, and the customer wants to handle the processing themselves, I'd still probably need to compress the captures so they're easier to transfer. Uncompressed, a 90-minute tape can be around 275 GB. Compressed, closer to 100 GB. Still huge, but slightly easier to manage.

Multiple captures can be decoded at once without too much of a processing hit, but it'll still take time to decode all 5+ captures of one tape. Those captures then need to be combined, which takes hours more.

For the cleanest possible results? Captures from 3+ physical copies need to be combined.

While laserdiscs can be captured all in one go, in my experience VHS tapes need to be captured at least 5 times to get the cleanest signal. Audio from VHS also needs to be captured separately.
RF captures for tapes & discs decode at about 8 fps in Linux, currently. 30 min VHS = roughly 2 hr decode.

Sometimes we do need reminders. The internet feels more isolated now - when DA & FA were the go-to sites, people weren't shy about letting you know how much they liked your work. Now, many hit 'like' and keep scrolling.

Your characters are unique & appealing, and always a pleasure to see.

I suppose it could be worse. Imagine having a career in animation, and then suddenly not. There just aren't any positions, it's all outsourced, or you're aged out. Now you may need to start over with something else, but what? What else can you do, after years/decades in a highly specialized field?

I can't watch any comic book stuff by creators who genuinely enjoy what they're reading, without YouTube recommending grifters who only find joy in shitting on everything. Things get especially bad if I watch anything X-men related...

I swear the algorithm must see my nostalgia for 1970s-90s Disney World, and makes the leap to politics no matter how many times I delete my watch history.
"Hm. Gen-Xer. Probably angry & bitter. It's Rogansphere for him!"

If I'm putting a month into something, I'd want - or NEED - to get more use out of the character than just one 10-second animation.
Meanwhile randoJackass3628415 on Instagram has Skynet churning out freestyle slop 24-7.

Rendering a stationary shot also might not take long.
The fluid sim on the maple syrup might be trickier, because that's outside my skillset. Also factoring in design & storyboarding, let's round up to 3 weeks. 3 weeks for a short, one-off lewd animation of a pancake girl.

...and real artists have to compete with that. Our employers may demand that we either use it, train it, or clean up its imperfections in post.

And what really stings, is your average viewer may not know or care if something is AI. What do online complaints matter, if Coke's sales don't drop?

Yeah, hand-crafted would be better, but how much more slop would the prompt user spew out in the same amount of time?
Worse, the prompts are sput-of-the-moment, "just for fun". They type the idea, and get a result. They don't have to plan, storyboard, build, texture, or budget for a month+ of work.

10 seconds in one week, and that doesn't include any simulation, rendering, or compositing. For the sake of argument, let's say those take an additional week.
So 2 weeks to make a hand-crafted slop video, vs however long a prompter's toy takes.