I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family.

One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.