How long does it take, if you only have half an idea of what you’re doing? After a few days of trying and somewhat succeeding, I decided to try installing everything from scratch on a new install of windows. It took me almost 30 minutes to get Scala with Intellij 14 working.
Granted if you had a better idea of what to do, you probably could cut some time off it (and if you were more attentive than me to the computer screen), but nevertheless it shows it takes a while for things to get going; not that I actually understand the cryptic warning messages splashed over my screen!