> In his notes, Miyazaki purposely leans into sounding old and stuck in his ways. He rants about how he’s painted with nothing else for 40 years, how easy and cost-effective his tools are — and then he undermines himself by suggesting that, really, this is all he knows how to do.

There's a deeper truth which is easy to overlook here.

If you want to get good at some creative pursuit, you have to put a lot of time, attention, and decision making effort into the skill. All of those are finite resources.

It's really easy to squander an unbelievable amount of time and effort on choosing gear. Doing that is time not spent mastering the craft. You might get really good at picking shit out, but you won't get good at painting, or poetry, or song-writing, or whatever.

This is why so many successful artists seem stuck in their ways or dismissive of gear, or, conversely, fetishize certain gear. Those are all mental techniques to minimize the effort they spend on picking stuff so that they can focus that effort on creating.