"Taste and skill" is my exact point. If you are not watching everything you have captured, then what you make will most likely not be as interesting than if you had.

I think your mistake is to assume editing is like painting, where you can just make something brilliant with a few colours and a canvas. But editing is much more analogous to writing a book. If you have read extensively on Ancient Rome and spent time comprehending the subject, you will create something far more interesting than essentially remixing a few primer books and articles that have suggested to you by an LLM.

People have indeed "been creating amazing things with nothing" in the expressive arts, but that approach falls short when the value comes from communicating depth from narrative information.