Well i did retopo it a few days ago myself and it was only over 3 hours. So i think once i get more efficient at it it would take around an hour.
But i did get this error afterwards. At first it was smooth, even when i opened it in my modeller program. So in my modeller program i created a clone and edited it accordingly and wield it to the retopo. Saved it. All was fine. Then i brought it into my sculpting program and it says 'There are t_shapes in this mesh', additionally 'Non-manifold topology', 'two-sides face', 'zero-length edges'... This has never happened before when importing models, so i assume this problem occurred while working in 3d coat. And the bad shading only occur after i reopened it again in my modeller program and tried to fix the error messages. Hope some of you have experience with this and can suggest where it might of occur or how to fix it.
And yes the deadline has passed but the person im doing this for didnt say it was a definite deadline.