What are you talking about. First time I set it up, had it running on my local network in less than 5 minutes. 5 more minutes for external (granted, already had the infrastructure for that in place).
Then maybe 20min going through the settings to personalize my account? And maybe another 20min looking if there are any plugins I wanted to use.
I don't think it's a year to setup the software. Rather a year to load it lol. I've spent probably close to 4 years loading content into my Plex server and I don't see any end in sight.