Good Enough?

This gorgeous sweater is from Romantic Style, which I purchased to further my knitting skills. Most everything in it is just slightly beyond what I'm capable of doing, but is stunning enough to make me want to suffer through the frustration of learning how to crochet, bead, and attach edgings so that they look nice.

The sweater in question requires none of the above, and therefore should in all fairness be simple enough--and so it would be, except for one thing: Purl 2 together through the back loop.

There is no stitch more time-consuming, irritating, or insta-carpal-tunnel-inducing than P2togtbl. Every time I have done it, I've wondered whether there's some mistake, because surely there must be a less awkward way of producing the same effect?

Apparently not.

And do you know how often I'm supposed to do it to make this sweater? About fifty bajillion times.

After trying three times--which is to say not even anywhere close to half of a row--I gave up. I'm just going to purl two together instead, and I'll ssk on the other side and it'll just have to do. And honestly, it looks fine. Really. To anyone who isn't an experienced knitter holding up a microscope, it doesn't look any different.

The problem is not so much with how the sweater looks, because I'm pleased with it, but with whether I'm being lazy. Clearly, there are knitters in the world--i.e. those for whom this book was written--that are capable of, even happy to p2togtbl over and over again until their wrists and/or needles snap to produce a sweater that looks only a tiny bit better than mine will. And I'm never going to be one of them. I don't want to spend the money and time on something that I won't enjoy making--which is the primary motivation after all, because really, pretty as this sweater is, I could get something much better for far less money if I didn't make it myself. And the fact is that I don't enjoy struggling with one stupid stitch for thirty seconds--which may not seem like a long time, unless you take into account that most stitches require only a half second, and as previously stated, there are fifty bajillion stitches to go.

I have no problem with the idea that I knit for my own pleasure and if I want to mess it up to make me happy, that's cool. But since I bought this book to inspire me to greater heights, and here I am taking the easy way out at the first sign of adversity...sigh. Is this laziness, or hedonism?