You have to consider the initial setup as a static cost vs. the pleasant workflow of continuous changes that in the end will simply make a better end product and that you will benefit from each day. If you’re working on a game the initial setup of perhaps a day depending on your technical background can easily be recouped over the year+ development cycle.
I just set up IncrediBuild on two of my machines as an experiment for full ue4 compilation. Next step is to hook up Amazon AWS and see how that cuts down of my compile times.
Finally with the improvements Unreal is making to hot reloading it may become less interesting over time, but I expect there will be a use for distributed building (light baking too) for a long time when working on small to medium sized teams.
While typing this the first UE4 4.5.0 build completed and the results are:
**981 seconds distributed over two machines 8+8 cores vs. ~ 1900 seconds on local machine previously! **