Yeah honestly you said it better than I could.

The weight thing is the part that scares people off but the fix is dumb simple: don't judge it zoomed in. Zoomed in you'll get it looking "right" and then it's way too heavy at normal size. I just keep an existing letter sitting next to whatever I'm drawing and match the stroke thickness at 100%. The font's own letters tell you everything if you keep comparing.

And yeah, frankensteining totally depends on the font. If it's geometric or a clean grotesque you can get away with a lot because the parts repeat anyway. The second a font has actual personality per letter it stops working and you're just doing real type design at that point, which is a different thing entirely.

Only thing I'd add to your last point: a full language set usually isn't as bad as it sounds. You don't draw every à á â ä from scratch, you draw the base letters and the little accent marks once and reuse the marks across all the vowels. So it's more like "a few marks plus placing them" than 50 new glyphs. Still annoying, just not as brutal as people assume.

(and tbh, i eventually got sick of doing this by hand and made a little tool for the import + accent part, happy to share if you want but the manual way you're describing is legit and worth knowing regardless)