Experience, Skills and Talent.

[Cunning Cartographer]

Weekly maps, in a year are are 48 maps, you not did the first hand draw map by miracle, was the experience that you got in all passed years doing map that gave to you this result
So maybe i am wrong about counting the maps done, but i fell that i only understand the lesson when i finish one.

It all depends on what is causing your "blind moment". If it's a creative process and not being able to come up with ideas on what makes a map interesting, then sure those 48 maps helped out, but I already knew how to use Photoshop before then. I actually had a check on my DA site and this is the first map I ever made, this was the first map used in our Star Wars tabletop Campaign (though much larger scale):



So whilst you can say "You made 48 maps", they're not the type of hand drawn maps I have in my linked CG gallery, so style/technique wise they've contributed equally to my current maps as every other piece of non-map artwork I've made in those 4 years. However, I didn't always make high quality maps each week and some of my later maps were really quick and easy and very basic because I might have had only a little time to make them or designed them last minute.

I think all in all I'm not really sure what you are referring to when you talk about your "blind moment", if it's when you look at a map and something just doesn't look right, or you can't get the effect that you want, then making non-map artwork will contribute to that, putting in hours of drawing anything will help you learn the tools you need. If it's a creative process and you're not sure what makes a good World/Region/Battle map then there's plenty of guides and articles to highlight what makes a realistic world/interesting battlemap.

It does feel like you're looking past what everyone is saying when they say "there is no <x> number of maps" because you really want to be able to quantify how many maps you might need to make before you're at a point you're happy with. Sorry, that's just not how it works. If it helps though, they say if you put in 10,000 hours of anything then you can become a master of it So if you put in 4 hours a day then in 7 years you'll be a photoshop/map making master.