When it comes to most of the "power builds", that [what you said] is mostly what it's all about. Putting in the "wrench time" to assemble the build IS actually more work than using it.
You can't fault Volkov for avoiding the shit out of the things that he isn't well suited to fight and focusing on situations where he's going to dominate, hands down. Yeah, I'd be impressed if he came out ahead against a decked voker/mace spec too. I'd also be impressed if some duergar warrior whooped a classic uber Paladin build, but for every one time you see that, you see a hundred logs of that duergar working over the builds he has a chance against instead.
Getting the build, acquiring the abilties (spam, virtues, controls, phylacs, etc.), nabbing the rare and specific pieces of eq, finding the sleeks, etc. are all the things that most players can't (apparently) pull off, at least not all together, to get to the point where the character actually "plays itself". So in that sense, Volkov is a pretty impressive character when compared to everyone else in WHO at any given time.
He's no terrible monster that has his entire range spamming 'quit' as fast as they can, but I don't think it's fair to knock him either. What he does in his fights is pretty vanilla tactics that probably shouldn't work as well as they do, but he put plenty of work in to get Volkov to the point where those tactics would work at all.