In my opinion, some of these examples are mistakenly called “easy” when what’s meant is “simple”. The type of thing that no one feels guilty asking someone else to do, because it sounds like there’s nothing to it. 
Lasagna doesn’t have any steps that are that difficult, there are just too damn many of them. If I’m going to make lasagna, it’s going to be big, and it’s going to be the best I can manage, cause otherwise it is NOT worth it.
Missed edit window…
Part of this topic is social, I think. People (in the past mostly women) would get together and work on some of these sorts of tedious recipes together, maybe not because it’s easier necessarily, but (I’m guessing) because it’s less discouraging or lonely than making them by yourself.
Taco Bell. Very easy to drive to it, but it’s a pain in the butt (and intestines) soon after.
I claim that I leave the potato peels on because it’s healthier. Really, it’s part laziness. But also they don’t bother me and are perfectly fine for you.
Same with moussaka and pastitso…each ‘bit’ is easy enough, but you spend hours and use every damned pot/pan before you get to assembling the bloody thing.
When my kids were still living at home (with a gaggle of their mates who would hang around until dinnertime) it was worth my while to spend the afternoon preparing such dishes. Nowadays? Not so much.
I do stuff like lasagna (when I ever get around to it) in stages. Do the tomato sauce one day, the meat sauce another, the bechamel and assembly another. I do the sauces in the slow cooker, so I couldn’t do them at the same time, even if I wanted to. For some reason, stuff seems to taste better the next day, anyway.
Certainly nothing wrong with leaving them on - unless you don’t like them in mashed potatoes. But not liking them turns out to be a pretty powerful reason for removing them. 
It’s an immutable law: anything cooked long and hard is ALWAYS going to taste better the next day. Fried fish? Nup. Spag Bol…absolutely.
Sushi, be it sashimi, nigiri, maki, whatever. Matchstick slicing cucumbers, making sushi rice, slicing avacodo, etc. takes time. Slicing the fish the exact size and shape while keeping it cool. Assembly and presentation.
Each step is very simple. Still a bit of a pain, plus there’s always room for improvement (at least for me).
My grandmother’s stuffed cabbage recipe is a series of simple steps, but there are a LOT of steps and added together, they take forever! Plus it’s one of those meals that really is much better the second day, so you cook it today for tomorrow.
To be specific:
Make the rice and let it cool.
Saute the onions and let them cool.
Scald the cabbage to remove individual leaves.
Trim the heavy ribs from the cabbage leaves.
Mix the filling.
Roll portions of the filling in the leaves and pack the pot.
Oh yeah, you also need to peel and cut up potatoes to cook in the pot with the cabbage rolls.
Dammit, now I want some. Maybe I’ll make up a batch this weekend…
Fried Chicken and/or shrimp.
Really just about the simplest thing in the world but also a pain in the ass, and given that there are multiple chains that do it fairly well and about 5 or 6 soul food restaurants that knock it out of the park within a 15 minute drive from my house I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to do it myself…
Also raviolis and pierogis. The filling is easy to make, and the crust/shell/pasta is easy enough. But assembling dozens at a time is just a lot of work. These are great for family get togethers, where someone can make the filling and dough, and then 20 family members can each make a few raviolis or whatever, and then we have a big batch ready to cook and no single person had to spend hours making each one. But you have to have a big enough family and enough people who don’t mind putting in the effort.
Yeah, well, you’re in Chicago and you have Harold’s.
I’ve never had a decent piece of fried chicken in a New York restaurant. Everybody got really excited when Buttermilk Channel opened, and raved about the chicken. Absolutely gross amount of breading, IMO. Another problem is having it served piping hot, when everyone knows fried chicken needs to be consumed at room temperature.
By the time you get home from the nearest Harold’s with your bag of chicken, it’s just right.
There’s a reason there is a fried chicken restaurant/Chinese restaurant/pizzeria on every corner: They can cook it better than one can at home. (not always, of course.) . We’ve tried making our own pizza innumerable times over the years, made our own dough and sauce or bought the very best, pre-made. Cooking stone and paddle. It always turned out thick and heavy and blah, nothing special. (Actually the Boboli crust was probably the best, we found.) . I’m not one for deep frying, I don’t like messing with vats of boiling oil and the smell stays in the house for days. And my stir-fries always seem to come out limp and taste like soy sauce over limp vegetables.
Fried rice noodles. Heat up some oil in a pan, drop noodles in, watch them puff up, scoop out the noodles. Takes just a couple seconds. Delish.
Except that they don’t all puff evenly, there’s going to be little bits of broken noodle and oil splatters everywhere. Then you have to deal with the left over oil: Toss it or filter and save it? And it’s a lot of oil.
An incredibly skewed ratio of actual cooking time vs. all the other crap.
This. Seasoned correctly, I’d be willing to bet you couldn’t tell the difference between this and the long cook style in a blind taste test.
Shrimp: unless you’re cooking your shrimp on the shrimp boat, they are all delivered frozen. The ones you see in the display case are taken out of the bag and placed on ice and allowed to thaw. Just buy frozen “easy-peel” shrimp, which have been deveined. Use the shells to make stock, if you want.
Mashed potatoes: yeah, you can nuke them. Or, if you’re a purest and insist on stove-top cooking, don’t cook them whole, cuz ain’t nobody got time for that. Cut them into smaller pieces and steam them, which only takes about ten minutes.
As for mine: lumpia are a bit of a pain to make, what with the rolling and frying, but the ingredients are simple.
My mother’s recipe for piroshki is dead simple, but it’s nearly an all-day effort because of the raised dough and deep frying, not to mention making those little packets of goodness.
A full-on turkey dinner is not difficult, but again, it’s usually a full day in the kitchen.
I just boil unpeeled potatoes whole, drop 'em in a bowl, pour milk and butter on them and mush 'em up. Add salt, chives and maybe horseradish to taste.
My wife makes a shrimp soup which is easy… except she never peels the shrimp because it’s a pain in the ass. Then I complain because it’s not any easier when the shrimp are hot and slimy with soup and still need to be peeled. So she tells me to feel free to peel them before cooking then and I do and it’s indeed a big pain in the ass.
Seriously, get the frozen EZ-Peel shrimp, as mentioned above. I can peel a shrimp every about three seconds, so it only takes a minute or two to get through a one pound bag. I make some shrimp dish about once every week, and it’s pretty straightforward.
Now, snipping green beans, that I hate – even if it’s just one side of the green beans, and lined up along one side so I can do multiple beans with a single cut, it always seems to take longer than it should.
I occasionally make my own version of runzas; as a single person, I’m grateful that they freeze well, so I make a dozen or more at a time, eat a few, and put the rest in a freezer for later.
Yeah but at least the payoff is good - farmers market green beans are head and shoulders above frozen, and don’t even get me started on the abomination of canned green beans.