For about a year, every illustration that left Chrientmip passed through me. Not for quality control in any formal sense — for a feeling. I would look at it and know whether it was finished.
That worked until it did not scale, and it stopped scaling at roughly four concurrent commissions. The bottleneck was not my time. It was that nobody else could predict my answer, so nothing moved while they waited for it.
Writing the checklist was uncomfortable because it forced me to discover that most of my feeling was six repeatable checks and one genuine judgement call. The six went into a document. The one stayed with me, and it turns out to come up about once a month.