The more I see just how much both of these things are limiting me. Right now I'm working on UI elements and at this point I'm proficient enough at this whole thing, that I can tons of space to improve the way my menus look and feel, but I'm also painfully aware how much time it would take me to get there and how absolutely unreasonable it would be for me to invest that time, when the whole game would benefit more from me putting it into more immediate problems.
The big factor that larger projects have over mine, is that they can afford to either pay other people to do other things, or spend a week just making a menu look cool, or to just spend a whole week themselves on just making a menu look nice. And that might now sound big, but these small things not only add up, they also do a lot of work when it comes to how well your game is perceived in the end.
On an unrelated note: I'm starting to enjoy making menus? It took a while for me, but I found a very good approach with GB Rober that I just carry over into other projects, which in turn actually gives me the space to think about things like how I want this all to look and so on.