Dozens of hours of work to make them yourself? You have a different definition of "better" than I do!
I have to agree. Especially since we're in a "rotating DM one-shot" phase, and doing that every single week would get old really fast.
I'm a big fan of things which mean less work for me.
Well I work the graveyard shift, and in my down times I've been building the cards. Last night I finished, the Bard cards, and got a good way through the Avenger, leaving me the Avenger to complete tonight and the shaman, and I will once again, have a card for every power.
And it's easy to just print them out and away we go.
The thing is, if we were talking about one shots, or just short term gaming, I would only print out the cards, so I was essentially building a set as it were for a class.
As they don't go to waste, and can be used again, and thus save reprinting them out.
And generally, no I wouldn't think it would be a good way to use time normally. But when your in a place for 8 hours at a pop, with only bursts of work to interrupt you, the rest of the time you have to wait for something to happen, well.. this gives me stuff to do during the down time as it were. (I've already got the campaign for our weekly game all set up and for that, I've also gone about working on making things modular for my games as well, with monsters. I take a monster, and run it up through the levels, that will likely be encountered, i.e. 5 above and below, and when I need more, it's easy to go to the base unit, and find the last level I had done with them and up it from there. And I've got a library of them also, formatted so I can just copy them into a open office excel sheet, and run an ecounter with all the opponents, and round tracking and hp tracking as well right there on the screen. You would be amazed at how much all these little things save time for gaming.)