User blog comment:Miskos3/Final Chapter in Official Color + Hiro Mashima's interview/@comment-200.8.22.175-20170728103827/@comment-2125188-20170730232836

Yeah, quality of the writing doesn't diminish hard work. The art is still as good as ever (and probably one of the best I've seen, that isn't overly detailed like Berserk). And even if it does, then I'm sure all the extra stuff he does with frequent extra pages, colour pages, double/triple chapter (sometimes for multiple weeks in a row), magazine covers, working on more than one manga at once (he was still working on a couple of series for the first couple of years into fairy tail's run), and doing all the other stuff he does with the spin-offs, light novels, anime and whatever else more than make up for it. He even stated in an interview that he hasn't had a day off in years. If you think that Hiro has it easier than any other mangaka just because you seem to think he doesn't put much effort into his story and his characters look alike then you're dead wrong. If that was the case, there would be a lot people not taking breaks and pumping out extra content, but as far as I've seen, no one else has come to pump out content at the capacity and rate that Hiro does, over a long period of time I might add.

And while does have more assistants at times, it is warranted given the amount of work he does. Assistants only really do the less important things anyway like inking, drawing the panel layouts and borders, drawing fodder, adding fx, doing the speech bubbles, colouring if needed etc. The bulk of the work is still done by the mangaka. And a lot of mangaka have a bunch of characters who look the same.