Varying amounts of talent are applied to get the maps you see. There are a few apps that will generate decent maps with but a FEW buttons being mashed, but you can bet the ones that make your jaw drop are the result of thousands of buttons, expert digitizer penstrokes, and hours upon hours of thinking. Talent, 'n other words. Gobs of it. Some of the Guildspeople here are so loaded with talent that it oozes from them as they walk, leaving talenty-footprints all over their respective home cities. Would-be mappers seek out these footprints and mop them up, to distill sufficient reflected glory to produce the odd dungeon diagram or campaign chart. Wish I lived near enough to follow some with a sponge - I could use an infusion of the mapmuse essence.

If you're implying that the ones involving computer actions are somehow deficient in talent whilst those involving pen and ink might be more talent-driven, well just look at my output. The paper-based ones are bottom-shelf material, while the digital ones are... well, bottom-shelf material too. :-). So maybe I am not a stellar example. At any rate, the simplest of tools on the computer, say, MS Paint, have been used to give us some of the loveliest examples of cartographic excellence. Your member intro notes you've been drawing maps a good long while - are yours all on paper? Fear not, we are not a digital-only bunch; the computer-born and -borne ones predominate just by self-selection (you are using a computer to see this, therefore you are some level of computer person, etc). We LOVE traditional media as well! Show us something from your portfolio. Also fear not that your work will suffer by comparison - we're an appreciative lot. I for one am convinced I can learn something from about anyone's works, whether noob or master, whether crude or deft.

From yet another angle, various denizens of the CG disclaim any artistic ability, yet they create maps varying from serviceable to sublime. Their point, once any false modesty is discounted, is that this stuff can be tackled as a craft as well as an art. Really, there are those here who also practice cartography as science too - not so much the fantastic subjects as the real-world ones of geology, oceanography, and the like. You find herein tutorials freely sharing the expertise of all those levels - art, craft, and science. You note you're impressed with what you see - pick a likely tutorial and dive in. I bet you can craft something that'll please yourself any those about you, even if the ways & means differ from what you're used to. What computer graphics apps might you have access to?

In one respect every last map you see here is computer generated - after all even the paper ones get to your browser by way of scanner or humble digital camera :-).

Oh, and welcome to the Guild!