Actually who is saying that 1 day is enough to model a character, is right.
A couple of things need to be added to explain this a bit better:
1) you can do this within the necessary specifics (polycount, good/bad deformability, uvmapping and so on...) only after having a bit of experience doing that. A lot of perople usually shoot out 1-2 models a day and they are complete crap. This means a) redoing them from scratch b) fixing them, which can be a long process sometimes.
2) modeling is the easy and fast part of the business: once you have a correct model, you still have to create a clever uvmapping for it, and, after this, you must spend the necessary time to paint the texture. And painting a texture is something that takes time and a lot of skill.
3) after modeling and painting skins for your character, you still have to rig and animate it, and this is probably one of the most difficult parts of the whole process: a good rig will give you a character that deforms well and in a believable way. And even a character that has a perfect rig can be animated in a crappy way if you don\'t know how to animate.
What I want to say with all this? That, I confirm, it is absolutely feasible to have a character modeled, skinned and animated in 1-3 days, but that only a person having the necessary skill and experience can make this character look good within this timeframe. I personally tend to ignore all the people trying to sell me ridiculous models for good ones, without accepting suggestions on how to improve them.
Keeping all this in mind, also try always to remember that PS is not a commercial project, so all the developers dedicating their time to PS are doing other things at the same time, especially one thing better known as \'Real Life\'. This means real work, family, studies, etc...
Personally, I feel (and MB will show this a lot better than AB), that there is nothing to complain in this situation, and that PS is progressing way better than it would be expectable from a similar kind of project.