As with any other endeavor, you're going to get faster as you go along. If those 9 renders feel like you've accomplished something, then you've accomplished something.
zger has a very valid point. The first time I set up a completely new scene (new locale in my game, for example) it can easily take me an hour - maybe more - to get it to the point that I'm happy with all the props, lighting, etc. If, on the other hand, I have a scene between two characters sitting in a room that has a whole sequence of renders, I may only need 5 minutes to set up each individual view once I've gotten the first one done. I save all my scene .duf files, so if my game goes back to a locale that I've already set up, then I don't have to pay that long setup time again - I can take one of the scenes I did previously and then just make alterations to it. Similarly, I save the characters as scene subsets, clothing as wearable presets, etc., so that I can just drop in something that I've set up before. So, to a certain extent, I accelerate as I go along, because I leave behind "reusable stuff." But early on, when every single location was new and had to be chosen, tweaked, lit, etc., I wasn't getting through very many per day.
So, factor all of that in to your self-evaluation.
My own workflow is to sit down and bang out a bunch of .duf files in an evening, and then to render them overnight using
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So, I tend to think in terms of "how many .duf files did I create in a day," since unless I'm doing animations, the number of files I'm going to crank out in an evening are going to render overnight without any problem. So, I'm really constrained by how quickly I can bang out the scenes, not how long they take to render. (I think that type of workflow is very common among people that are using Daz Studio to do games.)
