I go with yes.
I was a big fan of some of those imaginary tales and the alternate earths... but I never had exposure to ALLLLL of them. The story was simple enough. the plot was no issue... but most of the teams that they broke up into... Had a LOT of unknowns that I felt diminished the overall product for me. For example....
A green lantern (the wrong one), Firestorm and a Superman were the only ones I knew on that team. Frankly in the 30 years of reading since then I still don't care about the rest... though Obsidian I know more now, but still not a fan. Same with this shot.
They really dug deep to get some obscure characters in there, and a lot of the time it wasn't like Infinite Crisis... where everyone ever was in the background... COIE broke them into specific teams and put the spotlight on them.
So yeah... I could see where people would be intimidated by that. That's not to say they couldn't and shouldn't read it anyway. It rewrote the DC landscape and is a historical fascination. It's hard to be a Flash (either) fan and NOT read it... but the fact that it's been undone a dozen times now does make it less of a 'required reading'.
The amount of C and D list characters thrown into the spotlight just to get erased... meant nothing to me. It was a swansong for a lot of worlds and characters and something that fans of those characters found meaningful... but to a new fan, not so much.