I started the original Living EN World thing when I was starting college and had a lot more free time (and a lot more dedication to games than school). It is a lot of work, but depending on what you're trying to get out of it you can streamline things somewhat. One of the problems, from my perspective, with the original LEW was that there were a lot of different directions things were trying to pull at once. Much like sitting down to run a single table-top RPG for a group of friends, you somewhat need to have an idea what you and the players are trying to get out of the game. We really wanted rules for item crafting and running your own stores/guilds/kingdoms as big picture stuff, since the idea was that players would be the movers and shakers in the setting. This sort-of worked, and brought some neat complexity, but it is also a LOT of overhead. Since 5e largely drops item crafting and such, I'd say it's probably easier in at least that way.