Tychob: as I mentioned previously I totally understand you. You are preaching to a wholly converted individual.
I have come long, long ways. My first projects that I built used vacuum tubes. Then there were germanium transistors, expensive and fragile as heck. Then silicon transistors. Up to then one could still use the point to point wiring, utilizing solder lug terminals, as shown in the photo.
Then came ICs in DIP form. Those definitely one could not build a project, without one learning how to do your own boards, which in the pre-CAD days, required a lot of messy and slow manual work. Thank goodness for protoboards. I still have one that I purchased over 30 years ago.
Later came the digital circuits and microcontrollers, which required one to learn assembly language.
Nowadays is the time for SMT components, and worse, for the fine pitch or leadless components, some of which I believe are the work of the devil.
The point I am attempting to drive is that, thorough these past 50 years I have had to adapt. Do I always like it? Do I enjoy that any DSP can provide a much better filtering function, than anything I could ever accomplish with opamps? No, many timesthe answer is not really. But I recognize that the world has moved on.
I also miss the ruggedness and the warm glow of tubes.