Is MFPE the holy grail or overrated?

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Overrated unless you have an ultra competitive personality and not many non-finance interests.

On the whole it has been an underwhelming experience. I played myself by getting caught up in the ideas that prestige and making $300k my third year out of school matter at all.

• The job is accounting and project management which is boring and frankly not that challenging; the challenge is the endurance of working for sometimes weeks/months straight
• The people are generally type-A finance hardos that are not particularly pleasant to spend time around (no, [piece of analysis] doesn’t need to get done today, tomorrow actually would be fine)
• There is little respect for personal lives as a general industry norm
• You top out what you’re learning pretty quickly; you either know accounting well enough to figure things out on your own, or you don’t; you either can run a process clean enough that the wheels don’t fall off the bus, or you can’t
• There is little room for creativity or self directed work; generally you just recreate old templates and do more processing than design or creation of anything unique

There are certainly pros but since you asked about whether it’s overrated, then yes, as an end in and of itself it’s pretty overrated. It can be a necessary stepping stone, which increasingly is what I’ve noticed the position being used for. If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably chill as high up in the lower middle market up until the point that every deal you see is banked.