I’m an old fart and I still wire-wrap 1960-70’s designs so that they can be period authentic, but I did design and build one single surface mount project (it needed to be small) just to prove to myself that I could do it!
SM is not hard, it’s just intimidating for a newbie.
You can just drag solder many parts.
And a cheap 150$ hot air rework station will let you handle maybe 90% of SM chores.
A good microscope or even better yet a USB scope will help greatly.
You need a BGA workstation to do anything with modern SoCs ...nothing else will suffice.
I have been known to use an electric skillet to reflow a board,in a pinch. I used a 16 dollar hot air gun from Harbor Freight to do SM once... just to see if it could be done.. It worked,sorta, blew the small SM parts off the board at first though. Some Kapton tape made it work but it was a mess. :-)