Hours to full epic

I was playing pen and paper D&D yesterday evening, but everybody in my D&D group also plays World of Warcraft, and so we started WoW and showed off our characters. The best equipped among us played a couple of other characters first, and finally settled on a druid. He is "full epic", having mostly tier 1 epics or equivalent, with a few tier 2 epics thrown in. Looks very impressive, and of course the character has great stats. But while he was showing his character, one of the addons automatically displayed his /played time, and he had played that druid for over 73 days, or 1750 hours. That is more than one man-year of work on a job!

My priest only has three tier 1 epics, and two tailored epics, but I also only have 22 days played. And I'm not really sure if getting to full epic is worth the other 50 days. I'm not sure it would actually take 50 days, but between the raiding, the necessary farming to pay for potions and repair bills, and grinding faction or farming for resistance items I can imagine that it takes a lot of hours. My warrior has 40 days played, and only one tier 1 item, but it is him who is doing some of the farming for the priest. On the other side I can take a new character on a new server and get him to level 60 in less than 15 days of /played time, and that is without pushing it. My level 60 priest actually only took 13 days to 60, with a bit of twinking.

So I am wondering if going for "full epic" is really worth it. What is more fun, having one character fully equipped in epics, or having played 5 characters to level 60? As always I'm targeting maximum variety, not maximum power. At the moment I'm still doing a mixed approach, raiding on the weekends and leveling during the week, but I don't think I'll miss raiding terribly when I'll be out on holidays.