Ever since word got around that I'd actually gone through the process of setting up here, I've had a steady stream of people messaging me asking basically the same thing: was it worth it, and would I do it again. Short answer — yes, but I'd do a few things differently if I were starting today.
The thing I underestimated most going in was how much of a difference it makes to actually understand what you're signing up for versus just following whatever the most popular advice happens to be. A guy I used to work with picked his structure almost entirely because it was what his neighbor did, and six months in he realized it wasn't remotely suited to what his business actually needed. He ended up redoing parts of it, which cost him more time than just getting proper advice upfront would have.
I also didn't expect how much the emirate itself would matter, separate from the free zone question. I know a couple of people who assumed Dubai was automatically the right choice simply because it's the most talked-about, and ended up paying more than they needed to for something that would've worked just as well, or better, somewhere like Sharjah or Ras Al Khaimah depending on what they were doing.
Something else nobody mentioned to me beforehand: how much smoother things go when you actually have someone walking you through it rather than piecing it together from forums and outdated blog posts (myself included, this time last year). A friend of mine tried to do everything solo to save money and ended up spending more in the long run correcting a few early mistakes than the help would have cost in the first place.
If there's one thing I'd tell someone starting from zero, it's this: the paperwork itself isn't actually the hard part. It's knowing which of the dozens of options actually applies to your situation, and that's exactly the kind of thing that's hard to figure out alone. I ended up leaning pretty heavily on a proper UAE Company Formation Services provider partway through, mostly because I got tired of guessing, and it genuinely made the rest of the process far less stressful than the first stretch I tried to handle myself.