Anecdotally, it took me about an afternoon. I realize that I'm more technical than the average person, so setting up the certs and installing the python deps was a breeze because I've done it before; the documentation for the synapse homeserver was also quite good.

I see where you're coming from, but is this offering geared towards people like that? Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service, and Element as a whole is geared towards the techy DIY crowd. I know there have been concerns raised in other threads about its UX problems, and from personal experience most of my friends don't share the same concerns that I do about data security or bootstrapped personal infrastructure.