Fine tuning/distilling etc is fine. I was speaking to the original commenter's question about research, which is where things are trickier. Fine tuning is something I even managed and Unsloth has removed even barriers for training some of the more commonly used open source models.

They can absolutely do it, but they will get poorer results than someone who really understands LLMs. There is still a huge amount of taste and art in the sourcing and curation of data for fine tuning.