I suspect most of the people saying "you don't need Google Analytics! Do it yourself!" have never used GA for anything that meaningful. As you begin to really familiarize yourself with your website traffic and understand how to look at your clickstream data in a more investigative an analytical way, you'll start to see how nice GA is and how easy it is to answer your questions.

You also underestimate how ubiquitous GA is because it's free and extremely popular. I'd consider myself an intermediate to advanced user of GA, but for people less experienced, I can easily share stuff with them for complicated tasks or they know how to do a lot of the basics themselves.

In hiring digital marketing people, GA is pretty much on par with Word in terms of familiarity. It's something a lot of people have a basic competence with.