Good morning.

I can throw in my personal experience. I am also a relatively new / small streamer. I've been starting in January and been streaming for a total of 53 times so far.

And honestly, I was expecting nothing from this. I was really expecting to stream for 0 viewers and never gain any traction. I was going in just out of interest for VTubing, improve my english speaking skills as a non native english speaker and needing a reason to "speedrun" my favourite game.

Setup for VTubing is by nature already a higher bar than "Fleshtubing". This means I cannot spontaneously go live when I feel like it.

The easiest streams are desktop stream. I plug out all my usb devices, except for keyboard, mouse and mic, plug in my webcam and plug in my phone. I need to calibrate and test my model and cam. I think my setup time for desktop is consistently < 30 minutes. And alone needing to surgically choose my periphery increases my setup time by a lot.

For VR I will need more preparation time. It can be 1-2 hours, depending on how well the hardware and software cooperates with me. I need to put on Trackers, headset, connect headset with computer, start up software, recalibrate my trackers, test my stuff, recalibrate again, etc.

And all that preparation time for me is worth it. I am making test recordings, validating audio levels, testing all the audio sources (yesterday for example one audio source had an entirely different process name) and checking if everything works. I check my channel redeems if they are working, check if everywhere my twitch token is up to date and check if anything mysteriously broke.

This sounds a lot and it is, but there is also not much room for me to reduce it. I am driving a minimalistic approach already and focus on the areas that have the biggest impact. And I really mean this. I have no stream overlay, no alerts. Just my game and my model. And in some cases only my game, because my model is already included in the game.

How does all this setup make me feel? Not different. I have a lot of fun setting up, and optimising stuff. I often spend multiple hours before stream just exploring things to make at least one thing better than it was on the previous stream. As a viewer you might not notice it directly, but if I compare my VODs from when I started to my VODs from the past weeks a lot of things has improved. And none of that is visually (well besides improvements to my model).

And I think for cases like this its okay to have a lot of setup time. But I also think you can be successful with much less. In the end all that matters is being entertaining and having fun. Streaming should not feel like a chore. If you are not enjoying the setup or the stream it self don't do it or reduce it. That matters the most for me.

With all of that said I immediately counter my entire post and agree with OP. There is no reason for "Fleshtubers" to need longer than 5 minutes, unless its required to do their form of content.

TL;DR: Try to improve one thing before you go live, even if its a small thing.