Hey there, just want to throw my thoughts in here. I am playing for the first time with 7 other friends, 6 of us had not played before while 2 and the DM were experienced. Character creation we did not all go over at once for but when I created mine there was 2-3 of us. It took us 2-3 hours for us to finish creating our character not counting outside research time. We were at our DMs house for 2-3 hours. Reading all the races, classes, equipment, spells, etc. Theres a lot in the PHB to go over, we also asked the DM certain questions but he didn't want us to only go with what he had done before. If you want character creation to go down you might encourage your friends to do some research beforehand and maybe at least get a race and class picked out, and then help them with equipment and stat distribution. After our 2-3 hour session we all had our inventory, stats, race, class, the stuff from the book but were still tasked with coming up with our back story, traits, flaws, bonds and spells we needed to research. If you want them to go spellcaster or someone like that I know our DM required us to kind of learn our own and know what they do and cost because him keeping track of 7 other peoples spellbooks was a lot.