I absolutely didn't just log into this for the first time after nearly a year, so here goes if the person asking still wants their response:

Freelance editing as any sort of serious career is brutal. Finding work feels like a nearly impossible mission when most companies don't even bother to respond to inquiries. I'd love to offer you tips but at this point, it feels like I need a bunch myself.

Fun fact: Since Ragnarok finished, I haven't taken on any more freelance work with any company as I have simply been unable to convince anyone to hire me lmao. JNC themselves even threw me out the back door for pushing too hard in an attempt to get some new work after being stonewalled on the topic for a couple of years straight—I'd only been allowed to work on Ragnarok as an editor from the day I picked it up and was never offered up-to-date testing material to qualify myself for other projects when new acquisitions came around.

If anyone decent suddenly goes looking for editors, then maybe I'll get to do some more projects again, but at this point, I've all but accepted the career path is over unless I want to work for literal pennies at the lowest tier of companies.

Official subs getting better is a big part of it. The gains for a fansubbed release are now mostly down to better encodes/actual TSing/song translations. Putting in all that effort for a fraction of the viewership on a good day isn't that appealing to many people, especially when you add in the delays/workload associated with doing that work to a high standard (For example, many people have seen how long it takes GJM to do the studio-quality TS work it does on many shows and the release cadence for their projects as a result of that).

As a more nuanced answer: Far fewer people pick up fansubbing as a hobby now since most seasonal anime is covered by official releases and doesn't require people to step up to the plate to fill in the licensing gaps. A lot of those who may have decided to fansub 10 years ago would instead today choose to scanlate most likely. The demand is just much greater there. On top of that, most fansubbers now are much older and don't have the free time to devote to blasting out episodes of (multiple?) shows as they air at bumfuck'o'clock in the middle of the week as many of us old folks did as college kids in the early 2010s.

There'll always be a niche for archival-quality work from fansubs—I doubt that'll ever go away. But fansubbing as the way to watch anime as it airs is practically dead with a few exceptions every few seasons, those usually being thanks to Netflix. As mentioned before, the market's saturated by official releases and more of them are getting better on average as time goes on. As for whether many of the good official translators of those shows stay in the field is another question though, since at least at Crunchyroll, their pay is atrociously shit compared to the industry average. This is problematic as Crunchyroll usually covers the licensing acquisitions for the majority of an airing season, so if they bleed out their good translators, things may slip backward in terms of the quality of their final products. Luckily, Sentai licenses are usually high-quality jobs, at least, and their staff are paid much more sensibly, but they grab far fewer shows in comparison.

That should cover a lot of points, I suppose. Hope you were expecting a wall of text.

I wouldn't say I have any particular role models, but there are several people I'm thankful to. Two, in particular, are Steiner and Meru, who I massively appreciate putting their respective trusts in me and sticking their necks out to let me prove myself capable of the jobs I now do.

Besides that, there are a lot of people whose work I respect, and I think I'm reasonably vocal about those when asked, some highlights being the work Katrina has done in recent times on shows like Savage Maidens and Higurashi Gou, or void9000's blood, sweat, and tears spilled on several of his recent projects, and those are just two examples. I could probably keep going, but really, if you want a bigger list of those, just keep track of the people I follow, haha.

If we're talking fan work, then oh god yeah, I was fucking awful when I started almost a decade ago. That was a trial by fire if ever I had one.

As far as professional editing work goes, I'm always learning how to adapt to mediums I hadn't worked in before, and if I could revisit my onboarding volume of the Master of Ragnarok LN, which I suppose is my first editing job, I'd probably be more forthcoming with my changes and I'd be more mindful of paragraph formatting and take more care to keep things clear to the reader (for example, proper usage of speech tags in drawn-out conversations or conversations where the speaker may not be obvious at a given time, swapping pronouns with names where it's sensible to, etc).

All in all, coming from anime fansubs into LN, VN, and manga industry work continues to present challenges I have to meet head-on. I'm always learning and always want to improve.