After starting quite late, I am finished with the TIE Fighter. Took about 4 and a half hours or so. I think I shaved the time down a lot by doing all the 2x or 4x stuff at the same time instead of going back, such as building both wings simultaneously. Just make sure you have a lot of table space if you do that, because the wings get very big, very quickly.
Overall, it is a magnificent beast. The build was about as repetitive as you would expect, but there were a few really cool techniques and ideas thrown in there to throw you off a bit.
Strangely, the wings were the part that were the most fun to construct, where the cockpit was kind of boring.
The stickers were very annoying on this set, particularly the final ones that go on. Couldn't they have had me put those one before I attached the wings and obscured half the brick they were going onto? Ugh.
Thankfully, the set will still look awesome even without the stickers. It is very safe to skip them overall.
As for comparing the two UCS Star Wars sets so far this year, I am with Haloid1177. The TIE was not as fun to build as Slave 1 was, but as far as looks go this set is really tough to beat. Finally, we have a magnificently large TIE Fighter. This is a set where the end results far outweigh the average sections of the build.
Once I get some sleep I will try and get pics of all the UCS ships I have side by side for size comparisons. I do still need to rebuild UCS Imperial Shuttle. That one will still dwarf most ships.
Edit: One very cool thing about the set though is how easily you could modify it into a TIE Interceptor. I see this set and the printed dish pieces getting used in a lot of UCS TIE Mocs. Bombers and Advance Mocs will probably pop up quickly.