In short, yes. I can make way more money working 4 hours. So it's becoming annoying. Even when I do play properly, after about 2 hours I'm just done. I'm retrospect, I wasn't pot committed. It was early on and I'd of just been somewhat shortstacked. If it been a big tourney with some investment, I'd of folded. I know it. But I just am finding it harder and harder to justify the time reward of small tourneys. In another post, I stated that was cause I have school and work. I was considering reducing the number of tourneys I play to ONE a week, but raise the stakes. That way even though I'd face a tougher crowd, the higher reward would incite me to commit. Everyone basically called me a noob, but it's not because of my skill I'm not moving up grinding. It's cause I just don't care at that level to even be in the game.
What are your current stakes?
It's true that playing bigger stakes = bigger rewards if you do well, but you have to be able to beat those stakes in order to show profit. Especially if you continue to play those stakes.
Volume plays a huge role in MTTs as well, at all stakes. For one, you don't get a sense of how you're doing overall until you've played enough. I think at minimum, 500 MTTs is a good baseline for how you're actually doing. Obviously, the more MTTs, the more accurate the results. At 1 MTT/WK, it's going to take a while to reach that. Especially since you're talking about moving up and grinding MTTs, it's going to be really hard to get an idea of how well you're doing with only 52 MTTs/YR.
To be honest, 52 MTTs/YR is nothing. I've gone on 40+ game downswings before in just weeks of playing. Not saying you'll go on as bad of a downswing, but variance does play into MTTs and volume is the only way to really get out them. So, you have to factor in that. Take this for example: lets you and I are grinding MTTs, I play 5 MTTs/day, you play 1 MTT/WK. We both go on 10 MTT downswings (that's not bad at all). Given our volume, I'm looking at a 2 day downswing, but you're looking at a 10 week downswing given how often you play.
Honestly, 1 MTT/WK isn't even worth your time if you're looking to grind it out and move up in stakes. If increasing the volume isn't an option, maybe switch to SNGs. They still have the MTT feel, but you get get more volume in. At ~1 hour/game, you can play ~4 in the time it takes to play a 4 hour MTT. Another option is cash games since you can end whenever you want, allowing you to get in more volume by playing in free time than you would having to follow an MTT schedule.