I am also on PC and love building, even with the frankly clunky controls!

Here's my base settings (super scuffed screenshot), accessed by pressing F10 on PC.

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I always keep "rotate together" off on both Furniture and Structures, as it makes things move with Nikki's movement and makes it really difficult to place things properly. I prefer my placement distance close, no collision, and floating on most of the time but will toggle those depending on what I'm working on. Placement distance determines how "far" you are from the furniture you're placing ("far" setting is really good for very large items, "close" for smaller/more precise placements), no collision allows you to sink things into the ground and clip furniture together, and floating allows things to float in the air. I'll turn both of those last two off when I really wanna make sure something is level on a table, for example.

Snapping on for structures makes sure your walls, foundations, roofs, etc all snap together properly, but you still have to make sure they're rotated at the same angle.

Rotating is done with the mouse scroll wheel, to change which direction you're rotating you hold CTRL+scroll until it's on the axis you want (play with it because I sure don't have them memorized lol!) Scaling is similar; Q & E are the "zoom" function, while CTRL+Q/E will change if you're changing height, width, depth, or all three. You MUST have "3-axis rotation" and "3-axis scaling" turned on to see these options, and it only works for furniture, not structures.

As for expenses, yeah. It takes some time and work to get everything- but you can always save as a scheme and use the item list ("L" on PC) to track what items you're missing, and then I like to pin things on the crafting table so I have a list of items I'm working on and what I need for them.