I think published adventures require MORE prep, not less.

[RFisher]

I have to agree with the OP as well. Recently, we lost two Characters from our Rise of the Runelords Campaign. (one player got married, One attacked a major villan by himself) Having felt some frustration depicted in the last sentence of the quote above, I asked if they wanted to continue RotR or if they wanted to go back to the usual way we run stuff, which is me running a homebrew and improvising on the fly.

Pretty much they all wanted the homebrew stuff.

So I agree with the OP, even though the Paizo stuff was better than anything I could have put together (in a million days of vacation from work) It was more difficult to prepare for and to DM for me.

It seems that in the two ways that matter—(1) easier for you and (2) more enjoyable for your players—the Paizo stuff was clearly not better. So any way in which the Paizo stuff might be better is kind of moot.

Think of it this way: yes, it's hard to edit a novel, but isn't it easier than writing one?

I bet if you interview a bunch of authors, you’ll find that a lot of them do find editing someone else’s work harder than writing their own. (Otherwise, they’d probably be doing a lot more editing.)

Coming up with an adventure skeleton I can improvise around is hard, but not as hard as it is for me to glean the skeleton from a module and learn it well enough to improvise around it well.

(Which is just going to lead me back to my old point of different DMs need different things from modules, and a one-size-fits-all model risks being one-size-fits-none.)

 

[Hawke]

I found the same with KotS and Thunderspire... either I prepped to make ti great or it ended up really lackluster and railroaded. Compared to the work I put into my most recently finished homebrew campaign, I was shocked at how rough it seemed. Just my experience though