A pipeline is all about coordinating between teams / departments. So a single person probably doesn't have much to gain (the main value would be the benefit of rigor / tooling, sort of like using git for your own local projects). A small team might though, particularly those who work on short films.

A single person making a YouTube series though or something might find a lot of value in the structured asset pipeline, publishing new versions and so on. But most of the production animation/film tooling is quite heavy weight.

I do have some sample code for tools on my Github for my course (you don't need to take the course, everything is commented etc) https://github.com/dgovil/PythonForMayaSamples

And as for whether Python can help, it most definitely can but it depends on your domain. When I do any repetitive operation, I'm always looking to automate it.

Yes, certainly. It does not need to be complicated, a little bit of automation can go a long way. If something is tedious, try to automate it. It's faster, more consistent, and frees you up to tackle other fires.

Some examples:

* publishing

* converting between file formats

* simple compositing pipelines

* sending/archiving files

* validation

* organization

* tracking (approval/completion)

* script repetitive tasks in programs to shelves or hotkeys

My first "useful" script was pre-composing an email that sends following a successful FTP send. My second was a helper to relink project mediafiles (which might be on another's desktop) as relative paths so I could open them on my computer. As you scale up, your tools will likely grow more formalized - writing code to glue programs filetypes and departments together, tracking, approval, publishing/rendering pipelines.