I finished Vol. 1 and am working through Vol. 2; I've purchased all 4. Many of these reviews are from those who have not gotten far yet, so I wanted to wait until I finished a volume before writing.
One person wrote in their review00 that this study is repetitive and surface level, so I wanted to address that. That review worried me, since I was about the commit to a full year. I'll have to respectfully disagree. I have a degree in Theology (from my pre-saved days, a more liturgical degree - not Bible-based - so I'm going back and filling in voids) and I've found this to be excellent. I've compared this to studies being done in my own and my friends' churches, and nothing that I've seen requires such a deep level of thinking. In most other studies, people need only fill in short blanks or write a short sentence or phrase, but DG encourages a much deeper, inductive study.
It's true that it's repetitive in structure. It will ask you to do the same type of work week after week, such as annotating the text and identifying the attributes of God seen in the text. But I see this more as Bible study training than repetitive, mindless work - much like how a basketball player practices dribbling and foul shots over and over. It seems repetitive but eventually leads to deep understanding. I feel like I'm in a gentle Bible boot camp, learning how to look at the Bible with new eyes and make connections.
I'm a busy mom, I homeschool my kids and work part time outside the home, so I appreciate that I can easily fit this into my day. Days 1 and 3 are pretty short, since we're only working through the text within the book (5-10 mins). Days 2 and 4 can take a longer, since additional verses have to get looked up (10-20 mins), and Day 5 varies and is of more devotional nature, so it depends on how much I want to write and pray (10-15 mins). If I'm really tired (I do my Bible study at night), I might split the Making the Christ Connection day (which falls on days 2 and 4) into two 10-min sessions, but I still got the study done in less than 3 months because I try not to skip weekends.
Another thing I love is that I can study the OT and NT simultaneously. I wasn't ready to commit to one of the cover-to-cover or chronological studies since I'd be out of the NT for years, and didn't want to spend a whole year on the NT study, either. I wanted a mix of both every week. However, I feel like once this year is up, I'll be ready to for one of the studies that takes you through the whole Bible, having built a good foundation through this study.
I hope if you got this far, you'll consider it. It's not a piece of cake. You have to commit to opening the study day after day. But it doesn't take long. But if you commit, open it, and follow it, you will learn a lot!