While no natural spoken language is “intrinsically” any more difficult than any other (after all, kids learn their native language at comparable speeds regardless of whether that language is arabic, chinese or english), I suspect (surely research has been done on this?) that mastery of character based writing systems is, as you say, “not the same as other languages” and is actually intrinsically more difficult i.e more time consuming to learn, even as a first language.
Taking the arbitary goal of comfortably reading literary novels in the target language, I agree that most native speakers of English could do that in several West European languges in the time it took to be able to do that in Chinese. Personally, I found even Russian to be a cinch in comparison with Chinese.
As for learning at home, I really feel that if you have the right resources and inundate yourself with suitable audio and accompanying texts, you can learn with vastly more intensity than in a classroom setting. You can hone your pronunciation, learn hundreds and thousands of characters systematically and intelligently and get to the point where you can read authentic texts and listen to authentic audio much quicker than in a classroom setting. While this style of learning isnt for everyone, if your goal is to go from zero to HSK 6 in less than a year and after that to actually “begin” learning Chinese, including the glorious classical language, I dont know any other way of learning a language to that level in that timeframe.