I can't think of any tops that ended up a lot harder than I expected, but I have made several that I expected to be a lot harder than they turned out, and some that I expected to be hard - and they were.
There have been several times I've read over a pattern and thought - wow, doing it that way would be hard- and changed the method to something a lot easier. Sometimes it's because they wanted you to buy a special tool, and for me the tool was actually more work.