What's so complex? I wrote in the very beginning of the guide:
"In this guide, I will help you to setup an efficient working C/C++ environment. Despite looking long, the setup is short and easy (mostly copy/paste Emacs Lisp code into your init.el); most of the guide are explanations and demonstrations of many useful features. "
Most of the text are just explanations to help you understand what you are doing, why you need these features.
Or, you can have a simple recipe with 42 steps for setting up a working environment with Linux kernel in Ecliplse with barely any explanation, just learn by heart: http://wiki.eclipse.org/HowTo_use_the_CDT_to_navigate_Linux_... . The guide is merely for NAVIGATING the Linux kernel. Even with the first section of my guide with setting up ggtags or helm-gtags that you can do in 5 minutes, you can freely roam the linux kernel.
I can understand where he is coming from. At least in my case the question was - how come there is no package that does all this by default? Install the package and that's it... I want to be productive in my project before I get productive in init.el customization. Nice to have but it comes second. Anyway, I've bitten the bullet and after realizing that I'm not that smart to choose `the` packages for C dev myself, I decided (again) to see what others do with their setups.
Since I want to use it for navigation more than for programming these two made my day because I've found about global and how to integrate it with emacs. The rest came as a bonus.
Now I can go on with my work and not worry about customization until I have to.
I've been using Emacs for about eight years but never as a power user.
EDIT: Thanks for your work. This tutorial has some new ideas I want to try.