@joe.glass: All the time-consuming work of this post was in figuring out how to do this stuff with MediaWiki, which I had to do anyway for the book I published using it. This post is really a byproduct of that project. Once all that "research by experience" was done, it took me about three hours to write up what I'd learned.
It varies, though, other features have taken me much longer if they involved a lot of research and screenshots. #wikipedia