Has there been any edition of d&d where character creation is more involved than any edition of shadowrun?
It's not wildly simple, either -- D&D is squarely "rules medium" and there are plenty of RPGs with simpler chargen. But it's not notably hard for its space.
20 years ago there was more manual calculation of numbers on a character sheet, that now is likely to be handled by a digital sheet
In my opinion, character creation in shadowrun is relatively simple, if a little time-consuming. In WoD character creation takes 10 to 30 minutes max, even for a complete beginner.