Hi,
You are speaking multiple times of "noobs". I think less advanced users need a tutorial how to setup a dev environment. They don't need a huge installer with everything in. That would maybe ease installation but won't help understanding what's going on. And then, from my experience, users who want to learn a programming language, especially a language like C, are not that noobish anymore. They should know how to install a program or how to unpack an archive into a specific path.
I'm writing a Wiki page. https://wiki.geany.org/tag/win32/getting-started
Nice! However, the page seems to be in a namespace "tag" which was probably not on purpose. But renaming the page isn't that hard. I'd say it should live under /howtos/win32/getting-started
Then, if we would include Mingw for C development, then Python users will arrive and request inclusion of a Python runtime, then the Perl guys, PHP, Ruby, ... The installer would end up in a 3 GB file with everything included.
Anyway, what I proposed an addition rather than a replacement. It's just like there is a GTK bundled version.
There is a fundamental difference: the GTK runtime is necessary to start Geany at all while a Mingw/GCC environment is only helpful (not even necessary) to write C code with Geany. Please don't mix this.
Regards, Enrico