Quick Sketch vs. Finished Drawing

Here are two recent drawings. Coincidentally, the references I used were posed in a similar way. One of these took a few minutes and one took something like six times as long. Is one better?

The first is a sketch of W. Herbert (Buck) Dunton, a very successful illustrator and western artist whose name I ran across online. This sketch of Buck Dunton was done from a studio portrait you can find on the Dunton site, linked above. He was originally from New England but spent time in the West of the late 1890s cowboying and living the rough life. Eventually he attended art school and became a successful New York illustrator. He finally settled in Taos and turned to western art.

This drawing of Mr. Dunton is a mere sketch, tentative and searching in many spots, clearly wrongly drawn in others. It was fairly rushed, taking maybe 15 minutes on a touch screen monitor. The important thing was that this sketch did what I wanted, which was to study his interestingly long face, magnifying spectacles, and expression. A more finished version might be more interesting, but that wasn't the purpose of this particular drawing.

The second drawing is of Ms. Kirstjen Nielsen, who resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security, is considerably more finished, and needed to be. It took about an hour, using a digital program and a touch-screen monitor. The idea at the time was to explore the complex emotional state that the Secretary must have experienced. I wanted to study her expression but also document what seemed to me to be the physical effects of the stress. High office in difficult times takes a toll. Although it isn't a complete drawing (not every detail is drawn) it is a finished drawing in the sense that doing anything further would be unlikely to add to my original intent So it is finished. This image goes beyond a sketch, in several ways. There is clear attention to critical details--the central features mostly--and only cursory attention to less important things like the shoulders. Nonetheless, it lacks even a nod toward a background. Nonetheless it's finished.

Which is "best"? Neither is really better than the other, in my mind. It's silly to make a value judgment when the two images were made for different reasons. It's all drawing. It's just drawing.