I know about Firefly, but haven't tried it though, so my knowledge is a bit limited about it. I have heard good and not-so-good things about it from people that have tried it. But it is still in beta, so eventually they are going to fix it and improve it. But it looks very promising.

I didn't know about the Normalmap-online so have bookmarked it, as it looks very cool. 

I haven't tried SDXL yet, as I don't think my graphic card can handle it, it struggles with SD, but does slightly better if I use ComfyUI, but can't really get around the UI on that one. :) I am considering getting a new graphic card, but are waiting to see if some of them don't drop in price, but also I have my suspicions that they are working on graphic cards that are suited more for AI, given how popular it has become and they all pretty much run on GPU and VRAM. So far I don't have issues just using SD, as I mostly use AI for fun and testing purposes. I still think the biggest issue with AI is the lack of control, even with controlNet or when doing training (Which I have had little success with to be honest :D), I think you are somewhat limited and it is often very difficult to get consistent characters, both when it comes to their look, but also clothing etc. But also the lack of prompting detailed/specific scenes is a huge issue for me and to really embrace it as a valid tool for the stuff I like to create that is more important than the high-resolution testing material that SDXL offers, which is probably also why I haven't even tried giving it a go :).

You could probably use a tileable skin texture, as a sub-texture for dealing with potential seams and to use as a base colour that you can then adjust as you say, but again, most texture tools, at least substance painter which is the one I use, have the option to paint across UV tiles, it's very easy to spot seams now with the current tools. I honestly think it is far more difficult to find high-resolution textures of humans, as they often come with lighting information and other "artefacts" that you don't really want in your texture, so AI could be useful for that as well. But maybe Normalmap-online can fix that or at least improve it? 

One idea that I think could be done, that would make real AI texturing, is if you were able to throw a 3D model into a program and either based on a description it could generate the texture. One could imagine a spaceship, where all polygroups come with attached prompts, so, for instance, the outer surface could be "spaceship exterior" and the prompt would simply generate a texture based on whatever was written in that. Tools along this line I could imagine that we will see in the future if they managed to allow for better control.

I agree that there are definitely people that are going to be left behind. But I don't think it is only due to slow hardware or adaptation. Because currently or what is changing is that people that work in the industry come with experience, whether they are self-taught or have a degree, there is still a lot of time invested behind each person. But with AI, you not only get an extremely powerful tool, but it also comes with all the experience that it was trained on and can constantly be improved. The other thing is the extreme productivity that they deliver. One of the fun facts for instance within animation, you often see characters with only 4 fingers, because it saves a lot of time over thousands of frames not having to animate all of them, especially if we are talking 2D hand drawings. But assume that the AI were better at drawing hands than it is, you suddenly have an "animator" that doesn't care about such a thing and what details are needed, which a human workforce might simply not be able to compete with.

So the AI, depending on how it develops, especially if the control gets to a point where you can define characters and it can use these, whether humans can actually compete.