That is the process, yes, but it's not really that lengthy. You can usually just add the first pin and then copy/paste the rest in the row really quickly.
Yeah, for the most part library stuff is quick. Some tools let you pattern place the pins and plop them all down at once. High pin count parts like FPGAs and connectors with weird footprints are the big time sinks.
Weird footprints are really the only time consuming part with modern EDA software. Tools like Altium have templates, footprint generators, and features for bulk editing symbols and footprints so all you do is create a quick Excel spreadsheet with pin number and formulas for x and y (especially easy for FPGAs and processors with pins in a grid). You copy paste that spreadsheet into Altium and you're done. It takes me less than 10 minutes to manually draw a footprint for a 500+ pin processor this way.
Yeah, when I was doing library stuff I used Mentor Expedition which has all kinds of stuff for speeding up footprint creation. Symbols can be time consuming for the various XXGAs because some of our customers have fairly... elaborate standards for visual appearance, pin locations, etc.
