Successful has more than one definition. If successful for you is going to worlds, motion profiling and odometry are overkill (PID probably isn’t). If successful is winning Skills at Worlds, you need the most accurate and consistent programming possible. At that point, nothing that has been done in Vex as of now is overkill (in fact odometry and motion profiling are probably a must).
PID is not that time-consuming to get running well. Watching a tutorial like this could probably cut the time down to 2 hours for the basic set-up. Obviously, coding auton would still take time. I personally started working on odometry code about 1/4 of the way through last season. I was coding mostly from scratch. I got a barely functional version working about 3/4 of the way through the season. It was not accurate enough to be worthwhile. Not sure how long it would take using Okapi.