But I am afraid that many of you have a wrong idea about the costs of art.

I can say from my own experience that todays realistic art is not more expensive than a few years ago. It is the other way around. Tools like Modo and ZBrush allow to create in hours what we had to built in days or even weeks with old-school polygon modellers like Max, Lightwave and Co.

I can model a texture faster than I painted it in the past.

The tools are just better, we use less time. Graphic automatically became more detailed this way.
I would even go exactly the same route for a cartoon asset. So I don't see any difference here. And cartoon models can look way more rounded and cartoony when I use some proper normalmaps and modern technology.