On the way there, we flew from Buffalo around 6am, two hour layover in Atlanta, and then about an 8 hour flight to Honolulu. Arrived around 2:30pm local time. On the way home, we left around 4:30pm Hawaii time, arrived in Atlanta around 6am, had another two hour layover, and arrived home in Buffalo around 11am. All flights were on Delta, on time, and the service was excellent. We are used to flying Southwest to Orlando as well, but our first long haul flight couldn't have been better. We were in standard coach and they offered free meals to all fare classes, hundreds of free movies, tv shows and games on the seatback TV (never even used my iPad!), and the seat configuration across the plane was 2-4-2, so it was very comfortable being in our own row of two.
The flights and length of the flight were easy to deal with, but we did find it took about two days to adjust to the time difference. Hawaii doesn't observe daylight savings, so they were 6 hours behind when we went. For the first two days or so, we were exhausted by 8-9pm, and wide awake by 4-5am. Because we knew to anticipate this, we did tours to Pearl Harbor and Diamond Head on our first two days because we knew we'd have to be up early for those. Worked out well. On the way home, because we got home at 11am, we just stayed up until our normal bed time and had virtually no time adjustment period at all.
We considered stopping on the west coast, but ultimately decided to fly straight through and are glad we did. We wanted to maximize our time in Hawaii and we were anxious to just get there, and then to just get home on the way back. Stopping on the west coast would have taken a day or two away from our time in Hawaii on either end of our trip, and we didn't want to sacrifice that.