That is the most fiddly air filter replacement I've ever seen! Wow! Glad it's only once a year or so.
To me, the most painful piece is getting the cable guides back in place but after you change the air filter a couple times it gets pretty easy.
At around 20k miles I realized I should probably check the air filter. Knowing it would be a PIA, I got a new filter to just change it. I don't ride in the dirt, or live in soot filled NYC any more and the original filter was probably good for another 20k miles. Honda's aversion to having exposed fasteners makes getting to the filter an order of magnitude more complicated than it needs to be.