Has anyone successfully setup a 4-5-4 period format?

It works fine. You just have to obviously be very careful and precise when setting up your periods so you don't mess up the dates. Most reporting you'd want to do by period too instead of dates. Unless you have the period dates all memorized after a while. Though I'd recommend reporting by period instead of date in general anyway, even without non-fiscal periods.

Got it, so make new year, then individual periods? We do have FAM, ty for that.

Yup that should work. You'd probably have to set up everything manually (years, quarters, periods) rather than the one button push you can normally do.