> why even use NTFS in the first place if you're doing a network share? [...] Unless you were planning on being able to remove the drive and plug it into a Windows machine directly
That's exactly what I was planning. Also, the drive already had data on it that was supposed to be shared.
I did not intend to start a Linux-Windows flame war, I merely pointed out that for the majority of people buying a Raspberry Pi 2 for the purpose of using it for other things that learning Linux, Windows will be an acceptable choice and in a lot of circumstances probably get out of their way more than Linux. On the other hand, I don't know how you would use the GPIO pins in Windows, but that's easy in Linux. It depends on what you're doing and what you're used to.
What distro were you using? Most ship with NTFS support last I checked (though perhaps there's a higher concentration of distros without NTFS support for the RPi).
Similarly: why even use NTFS in the first place if you're doing a network share? Samba can serve files from an ext4-formatted volume to a Windows client just fine. Unless you were planning on being able to remove the drive and plug it into a Windows machine directly, there's no need to use NTFS at all.
> Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources.
This is true of a lot of things, no matter which operating system one uses.
Remember that Samba is designed for enterprise environments. Setting up a fileshare in such an environment with Windows is typically just as complicated (but involving a lot of graphical wizards instead of configuration file editing), since there's a lot more involved than just right-clicking the drive letter and telling Windows to broadcast it on the network.
You're right that the process for sharing files over a network with Windows hosts ought to be made more accessible for home users. Linux doesn't really have a "Homegroup" equivalent, which is unfortunate.