I have been teaching myself Maya from tutorial the last 2 months. I can do a simple model and a fair render of it now. Making skeletons, deformers and animation is still far away. Maybe that can give you some insight. You last example is no where near perfect, but I guess that is about as much as one person can squeeze out doing everything.

The story has to be very good to compensate for the inferior texturing and stuff I guess.