(Opinions) - Is cantina farming actually difficult/time consuming?

That's if you're looking at farming a single character. The nice thing about hard node farming is you can easily farm 5 or 6 characters at the same time, just hit their node each day. Sure it might take 4 or 5 months but they'll all be done around the same time. On the other hand cantina you can only do one at a time (I mean you don't have to, but doesn't make much sense to do them in parallel), so 5-6 characters could actually take longer depending on the energy of the node.