The goal of my hand coating is to produce a consistent product. (I guess that calling a hand coated piece of paper a product might offend some, but when I am producing a show of twenty or more prints of the same locale, my goal is produce a paper with a consistent set of tones.) This is necessary to me because I want all the prints look like they belong together. If you are even semi-skilled in hand coating and develop your own procedure, rhythm and coating techniques you will find that consistently hand coating a light sensitive solution on a piece of paper is fairly easy to learn. Each print is unique, but my goal is to make it very difficult to find out what is unique to each print.
I am not locked into the process and amount of work to produce a print. I can appreciate the craft, skill and effort to create, but in the end a photograph is judged on its own merits. Often, the person making the judgment does not know what effort went into the physical print. If they buy it, they like it for what it is, not what went into it.