In the old alpha, starting from scratch and getting to the point where you had the materials to build would be HOURS plus maybe low TENS of HOURS to upgrade axes, picks, etc. In the new model, it looks like many base materials can be placed with no gathering at all and you will spend HOURS harvesting rare materials. You will need to spend a couple of hours visiting swap meets to gather micro-voxel templates, and anywhere from HOURS to HUNDREDS of HOURS learning to make complex shapes.
That said, you could build a decent, attractive structure with only a few hours of time invested if you have the artistic talent or really great spatial reasoning. Building something impressive in EQ:L is also about understanding what composition works well in the game to produce a good design, and what doesn't work, and then having the voxelmancy skills to understand how to compose it.