"Amateur" used to mean someone who worked for the love of it. Such people often produce better results than those who do it only for money or even a lot of money
If you care enough about a task, invest the time to do it well. It should get quicker and easier and the results will be better and more "professional" in due time.
In the book The Three Musketeers, Dumas tells the story of how d’Artagnan who is a young swordsman without much of an official training, from a remote region of France, eventually becomes the best fighter in France. This is despite the fact that his peers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, have much more experience and training.
It may seem farfetched, but before the industrialisation of the Far East, and the way the West interpreted martial arts, with the coloured belts and all, there were regional masters of these arts, who practised them as much as they could and honed their skills. However, despite all that, they never ruled out that they would one day fight against someone who never fought before, and lose.
It took me more than a year to write The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it which was my first real story, but it took me about two weeks to write Summerschool at the NSA. This is whereas the screenplay for the film Spaceballs (which was written previously by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham, and Thomas Meehan) took "only" six months to write.
Similarly, it took Bob Dylan less than 20 minutes to write "Blowin' in the Wind" which is considered a masterpiece, but he likely wrote many lesser songs before that.
In 2022, amateurs (also known as "geeks") are often offered token pay, or even large salaries or one-off sums of money (while agreeing to do some commissions or jobs for free).