Is Magento the Rubik's Cube for Web Developers?

If you haven't heard of it, Magento is the latest all singing and dancing open source eCommerce solution. The features are far and away the best available for any serious online store and quite frankly blow the competition clean out of the water. Being open source, it is also FREE (which as you might know, I am always keen on!). So for a tight-wad Web developer it would appear to be the ideal platform for creating new eCommerce sites.

However, there seems to be one huge problem which is scuppering many potential users before they even get into the starting gates... The installation process is an absolute nightmare!

Me, myself, and indeed I, (left brain, right brain and no brain) have wasted more than a couple of hours trying to install a working copy of Magento. Initially I was quite excited at the prospect of having such a wonderful open source eCommerce platform to experiment with, but my excitement has now made a hasty retreat and I am left feeling very frustrated and wondering if Magento is really worth the investment of time and concentration required - If you think I'm overstating things, then check out the Magento help forums where you will see all sorts of queries and virtual head scratching from equally frustrated wannabe Magento users. In fact; at the time of writing there are currently 4026 threads in the Installation Problems topic alone!

Now I'm not new to installing scripts and I have successfully negotiated my way around quite a few different eCommerce, Content Management, PHP and MySQL packages and there are occasionally little 'quirks' which have to be addressed. But Magento is in a whole different league IMO and makes the Rubik's Cube look like one of those kid's join-the-dots puzzles.

Call me cynical, and many do, but I can't help thinking that this difficulty is sustaining the professional installation service touted from the Magento home page and currently costing $149. If this Open Source package is as good as it is supposed to be, then the price of installation is small beer and I wouldn't begrudge it for a moment, but I really would like to try before I buy.