I went in blind and set everything up within 30 min easily running the Unifi controller that needs a properly setup Java runtime environment on OS X El Capitan.

I went in blind and set everything up within 30 min easily running the Unifi controller that needs a properly setup Java runtime environment on OS X El Capitan. I'm going to put the controller on a Raspberry Pi soon as well to move infrastructure software off my work environments. It's kind of cludgey to setup Java still in 2016 but if that wasn't your issue I'm not sure how you expected to install everything. It seemed fairly clear from the quick install guide that you need the controller daemon / web server running first and that it will discover the AP you need to provision. I'll take an awkward, consistent Java runtime setup over random solutions for, say, Python web servers using all sorts of configs.