Sorry, long post alert. TLDR? I dunno, less art more craft, I guess.
From a hobbyist perspective who doesn’t really release anything and does it mainly as an extension of my love for music, motivation is a complicated beast.
Sometimes I compare it to painting, in that I have the space, the paints, the canvas, but yet all I know of painting is what I’ve seen in a gallery. I vaguely know in some way that that painter has years of the craft behind them and that’s probably the 20th time they’ve painted that subject, but I don’t apply that same test or process to my music, but I want the kind of result that comes from it.
The other thing I sometimes compare it to is the phase I went through making hand stitched leather wallets. I eventually made some I was really proud of, but the earlier ones were pretty terrible. The thing is though, they were all finished, and even finished crap was way more satisfying than something beautiful you gave up on because of one wonky stitch. Mess up but keep going because hey, it will still work in the end, it holds cash and cards and fits in your pocket. My wife would tell me to stop being down on myself everytime I pointed out the flaws in what I had just made, but really I wasn’t, I was just focussed and excited about knowing what techniques I had to refine for the next one. As an example of how often art emerges from craft, there was one wallet I made that was supposed to be visually pretty, using a few coloured leathers. It came out ok, but what surprised me was that it was beautifully tactile through some unplanned combination of the size, the feel of the stitching where you held it, and that each of the three leathers had a really different texture, from rough to buttery smooth. Holding it was a bit like wearing those massage sandals 
If I applied my approach to making music to my very amateurish woodworking, it would probably look like sketching a plan for a rocking horse, grabbing the tools for pyrography, the materials for a chicken coop, and then trying to build a dining table and expecting it to be just as good as the dining tables I hear on the radio. I think there’s a reflex with making music that says that if you had plans, tools, materials and intent to make a table that hey man, you can’t take a formulaic approach with art.
Relating music back to my other hobbies, I’m hoping for results that are completely unjustifiable with the amount of effort that I put into each of the steps.
For me currently, the trick to staying motivated to turn on and play with gear is to not try and make anything, just hey, today I’m going muck about with this aspect of this thing and that’s it. That’s things like coming up with a drum pattern not for the pattern’s sake, but as something to jam bass over.