Whimsical thought for Friday …are kids books the new version of working on a novel ?

I only ask because I know of four colleagues from the creative/communications industries who are all independently professing to be working on concepts/illustrations/stories for kids books and entertainment enterprises. Whatever happened to ‘working on the [great but unfinished] novel or screenplay ? Having had such a beast – working title Nashville Tartan -occupying sock drawer space for too many years, it ain’t easy to get the time to finish it. And for it to qualify as a novel, you’re talking about generating circa 200 pages of peerless prose. Question then; is the kids book a shorthand creative cop out , or simply evidence of an as yet unexploited, unsaturated market gap ?