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I dislike the pox walkers models, and painting swarms of guys after working on a genestealer army doesn't sound appealing, so is it doable to make a decent DG army without them. (I'm referring to local gaming store decent, not cheesy tournament mobs of conscripts or tau commanders decent.)

Not necessarily, it depends on what kind of army you want to play. Zombie Hordes are a very popular Death Guard list, but especially with the recent points cuts for Plague Marines, it's not the only type of list you can play. I'd say that if you want to do tournament play, you'll at least want 20ish guys to serve as screens against DS, Mortal Wounds, charges, etc, but that's only for really competitive play. (And Cultists could work here too.)

Poxwalkers make great screens for the rest of your guys but if you have Typhus you will want them just for them to be stronger and tougher in his bubble effect. I tend to always play a 20 man unit just because if your opponent guns them down they aren't putting as much into the rest of your army, and if they do get into assault the sheer number can hold a unit or character in place for a good while.

They aren't a "must-have".
MSU of plague marines with blight launcher/plasma are competitive as well. And in a casual setting you can even go with the fluffy squads of 7.

They open up some strong strategies, but aren't a necessity. It's like with the grenade stratagem and Biology professor: You can do it, it's a strong tactic, but there are enough other things to do with DG.

I mean it depends on your LGS. Probably yes. That said having a few of them for a cheap screen against deepstrikers is probably a good idea.

I think it's fine to run DG without pox-walkers. I also think it's fine to run Astra Militarum without infantry or conscripts.

It won't be winning any tournaments (though if the meta shifts away from alpha-strikes for some reason, screens may drop in importance), but it's certainly not going to auto-lose a fairly casual game.

DakkaDakka tends to have 2 extremes: either a unit is utterly OP (Conscripts before) or utterly trash and never taken (Conscripts after). I think the reality is somewhere in the middle (and I think it was with conscripts too), but that doesn't distill out here at DakkaDakka. Certain posters blatantly ignore data, other posters have their preferred causes that they champion,* but if you watch online battle reports (or read them, I just put one up! shameless plug) you'll see that most lists are fairly fun and casual.

*lately even I have been guilty of this. It happens.

DG is a very well balanced army in the sense that pretty much every option is good enough to bring but not a must-have. I think you'll be fine without walkers.

As a DG player with predominantly marine lists (no zombies or daemons), you can completely ignore poxwalkers if you wish to. Cultists can provide the same screening effect if you need it but if there is no deep strike or Smite spam in your friendly meta, even that isn't an auto-include. No energy to paint hordes? No stress: put together some marine squads with terminator support, perhaps a tank or two, season to taste with Elite and HQ characters and go to town.

I think you don't have to have them, but you'll miss them as you see opportunities in games where they could have excelled.

Being able to pump them up to S/T 5 with +2 to wound and proper timing of their strat can potentially be amazing, and the maneuver is relatively cheap to pull off, CP wise. Put a DG Daemon Prince nearby, maybe find some room for a small detachment of CSM if you really want to max it out with Prescience from a CSM Sorcerer or Daemon Prince with the Mark of Nurgle and that mass is hitting on 3+, wounding anything in the game on a 3+ which is pretty impressive.

A lot of the competitive tournament lists are building in a unit/combo that overwhelms the wound mechanic, AP is decidedly secondary to simply pushing out as many wounds as possible, and properly buffed, Pox Walkers will do just that.

In ways yes. But I don't think an army based around them is worthwhile or fluffy. My lists tend to use ~40, I don't think I'd go more than that. If I wanted to play Walking Dead, I'd play the Walking Dead game.

Personally I think you either need poxwalkers or cultists, as stated above, if not for anything else than to simply screen your more elite units. Either way it'll mean painting a lot of models

I love poxwalkers, but I am very much in the same boat. I get burnt out painting hordes.

Personally, I run 20 poxwalkers and 30 cultists in my lists.

If you do decide to run them or cultists, (Sort of manditory in any semi-competitive metas.)
find a simple paint scheme that works for you. I use primarily washes on mine, I can knock out 4-5 of them in about 2 hours.

Pox walkers and Cultists (and Daemons when they finally get fixed) all have the advantages of being a cheap Troops tax for running multiple battalions, especially for a Marine army. I've always been heavy in cultists for 2 editions, and loved playing the Typhus Plague Zombie lists so this totally floats my boat.

Now Plague Marines are cheap enough to consider, but I wouldn't have thought so for 6th and 7th. Only after Traitor Legions made Marked Marines decent did I even field normal Power Armor in a Chaos list.

Poxwalkers at least are different from Genestealer cult in that you can whip out a finished squad of them using nothing but a white basecoat and some successive green/brown washes. So it’s not too awful speedpainting them.