Absolutely worth the effort, for me, anyways. I'm don't operate the radio more than a couple of hours a day, but when I do, my favorite activity is just rag chewing with the "locals", i.e. stations in the Northeast from say Ohio eastward, and North Carolina northward. 160 is an important band for that, and if you want to flex your AM muscles a little, too.
The nice thing about putting up an L is that you don't have to get all crazy about making it perfect. Just about anything will work. Sure, you can obsess about optimizing it, but it's not absolutely necessary. And, once you put it up, it can be a work in progress.
For example, mine is up all slapdash right now. The only thing I did "right" is hoist a pulley on an insulator into a 90ft tall pine tree. It's an elevated feed, up about 15ft at the eave of my house. The vertical element goes up at about a 20 degree angle to the tree, with about 70ft of wire to the pulley, and another 85ft of wire slopes back down to the ground at about a 45 or 50 degree angle, i.e. it's not even flat-topped yet. I've been too lazy to put another pulley into another tree. I just extended the wire with another insulator to some 550 cord and brought cord down to the ground and tied it off about 10ft up in handy tree.
I put up two random length elevated radials. They are about 150 degrees apart.
I tried a 1:1 balun and that didn't work. I tried a 4:1 balun and that didn't work. I tried no balun at all, just a plastic box I made with an SO239 mounted in it, and that worked great! Indeed, most of the L plans show no balun at all, just a choke (I use snap-on ferrites) and usually some sort of capacitive match. I don't have a match (yet), that's what tuners are for
Initially my wire length (14AWG THHN) was 125ft, i.e. a quarter wave on 160M. That worked, but I couldn't tune up on 80 or 60 or 40 very well, and I wanted this to be more versatile in case something ever happened to the dipole array. I added 30ft by splicing it on at the insulator with a wire nut, then adding another insulator at the end. 155ft did the trick, and now it tunes up well on 40 and below. I tried as much as 175ft, but it got worse again as I made it longer.
I really should have my tuner at the feedpoint, and it is a nice remote tuner, an MFJ-998RT, but I use if for both my dipole array and the L, so it lives at the dipole feedpoint and there's 50ft of RG-8U that goes to the L feedpoint.
Performance-wise, on TX it is great. I get good signal reports from everyone on 40 and below. I couldn't run 160M before, the 80M dipole element would only allow 300W or so, and absolutely no AM, as the standing waves on the dipole ladder line were so bad (voltages high) that the balun would saturate. But now I can run any power I want and AM on 160M and that made me very happy. On RX I am less happy with it. It is a VERY noisy antenna as currently configured. I work around that by using the dipole on receive and the L on transmit.
So, again, I am happy with it, and it is a work in progress. I need to clean up the plastic box at the feedpoint and attach it to the house properly. I need to get the other end in a tall tree. I need to add another radial or two and optimized their lengths. And I really need to put the tuner at the feedpoint. I figure in another two or three years I'll be done with it. That's how long it took me to evolve my dipole array, why should this antenna be any different
After that, maybe I'll put out some nice beverage antennas for 160M receive. That's what all the big boy 160M DX'ers do: L's on TX, and beverages on RX.