to Yoast or not to Yoast – that is the question – duplicate content

i’m looking at the yoast default plugin, lots of features, great reputation, but i’m concerned about how much it might complicate things vs help

for instance, regarding duplicate content, yoast has a setting called Titles & Meta > Duplicate Content Prevention (see pic)

in part it says:

If you’re running a one author blog, the author archive will be exactly the same as your homepage. This is what’s called a duplicate content problem.
If this is the case on your site, you can choose to either disable it (which makes it redirect to the homepage), or to add noindex,follow to it so it doesn’t show up in the search results.

if admin is creating most of the listings, but not all, and also creating a few content pages (like instructions on how to use the system, a few commentary pages, but not lots) what would be the best way to help prevent duplicate content?

should yoast be used at all?

thanks