I agree that telling the story is what's important, at least for me.

I just wanted to clarify that I'm not using the same methods as your sister. Usually this frees me up to spend more time telling the story and less time fussing with making sure the characters look the same in each panel, but with the outdoor shots I've been doing lately, I'm losing all that time loading huge 3d files, waiting for them to render, fixing little mistakes, repeat, etc. It will be a relief to get back indoors with smaller files and quicker cycles.