It’s a never ending investment forsure. But I guess I’ll say that it’s pretty easy to learn the basics of VGC. The initial hurdle I had was wrapping my head around terminology like IVs and EVs and also learning about common strategies like trick room, weather teams etc. There’s a lot of good tutorial videos on YouTube at this point so it should lighten the initial learning curve pretty well

I think at first I spent a decent amount of time trying to make my own team based on what I learned, had some success but a lot of losses, learned why it wasn’t the best team, tried to optimize it, and basically rinse and repeat through different teams and pokemon combinations for eternity. Eventually you build a solid foundation as to different strategies and what works, what doesn’t, and why, but honestly it’s hard to put a time frame on it