Any unmoderated platform is never a good place for discussion.

That was the other thing that sticks out in mind about PC gaming, specifically when it comes to self built PCs; you spend a lot of time tweaking settings, updating and modifying, even after the process of mapping out hardware specs, pricing all hardware to get the best parts under the same budget, assembling everything neatly with clean wire management and airflow, overclocking CPU in BIOS, stress testing OC settings for system stability, overclocking GPU, stress testing settings for game stability, etc. and I still spent a lot of time tweaking settings in each game to get the best performance to visuals balance.

It was almost like every game I played with a decent engine became a benchmark program for my system. I had fun with that, but I spent a lot less time actually playing through games as a result. That doesn't happen on a console. 

It depends how demanding you are. I built my PC over 2 years ago now and don't really fiddle with it much. I launch the game, put it to 1080p Ultra and see what happens. Using fraps, look at the framerate and then decide. It rarely takes me more than 10 minutes. 

I only really buy brand new console games, hence have to deal with pre-order codes on them which wastes a good 10 minutes as well

The real problem is I'm going to have start making more comprimises as my 670 based system ages and becomes less and less competitive. That's going to take time and I'm going to have to think about whether a game is going to work before trying to run it, though that's mostly just due to poor optimisation

My PS4 gives me nice peace of mind that everything is going to work and that's good for me. it's also dead easy and is nice and attached to my TV (I know that doesn't work as a sentence, but whatever). My PC gives me the chance to tinker and generally play slower paced games, mostly turn based

In some ways I want to get more involved with PC gaming, but as the OP says, the PC gaming community is toxic. So I want as little to do with them as possible

Can't be as bad as that stupid Darude - Sandstorm thing.

how does that shit even start....

When I see a VGC mod using the same thing as sig I see no difference between youtube and VGC.

The worst part is when you're on Youtube watching a review of an exclusive title and one of them pops up saying " I can't wait for this to come to PC". My last experience of this was with Blood Borne. This one PC gamer was so resilient in his belief that Blood Borne will make its way over to PC because he played Dark Souls not knowing even about the existence of Demon Souls and Sony and Softwares collaborations to make both Demon Souls and Bloodborne. In the end we all just had to say "Sony isn't Microsoft" and he kind of got it.

or the ones saying why isn't this coming for xbox!

You only have to do that if you want to, though. That is the advantage of PC gaming, you have a choice of how much time you spend to 'perfect' your system, but honestly it takes a month or so to get it just right for a future of 4-5 years of gaming (and other things) on it (assuming you are not an enthusiast who needs every latest CPU and GPU X 4 per annual release.) I personally like that I didn't have to wait for From Software (or Square Enix) to release a patch to fix the abhorent framerate  and low-resolutions (720p) of Dark Souls ( or FFXIII) or that I can modify Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind to look essentially identical (if not now, in the near future i.e Morrowind, Skyoblivion.) 

To give you an estimate of my personal experience with my new PC (built in October, previous desktop build was in 2009.) It took me 2 hours to build and get it running with proper wire management. It took me half an hour to install the operating system and transfer my games from my other computer. It took me 20 minutes to overclock my cpu, since my motherboard has auto-overclocking features (I could've gotten better voltages/temps at higher framerates if overclocked manually, but I chose not to.) Then I installed Skyrim, installed mods, and tinkered with that for a few days. And then I played the game for 40 more hours (on top of a 500 hour history.) Skyrim, in particular, is a PC game in which one will tinker the most (another being GTA IV.) For games like Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within, I just installed and played just as easily as if I installed and played them on a console. And if something didn't work with them, I was guaranteed a fix within a week by the community, without having to wait for their respective developers to come up with something. 

Yes! lol It took me a week to search for any mods that I liked, then another to get the game running stably and learned how to mantain the game,I really enjoyed it though.