/3/ - 3DCG

How long does it usually take you to retopo a mesh?
I use front/side profile references and extrusion modelling, but I always end up with ugly edge flow in the shoulder/upper chest and the leg/hip connection, and it takes another day or so to delete faces and replace them with cleaner loops that would deform better, looking at reference images of good edge flow.

Is that a normal workflow? How do professionally made meshes end up with such perfectly smooth vertex placement? Are they all manually placed? Is it just down to experience?