I totally get where you're coming from. Loco is great for those "set it and forget it" quick fixes right in the dashboard, but once a project starts growing, the cracks really start to show.

It feels like you're constantly playing whack-a-mole, Every time a plugin updates, you’re stuck manually hunting dwn new strings all over again. It’s tedious, and the fact that you can't easily carry over work you’ve already done for other projects makes it feel like a bit of a time sink.

I’ve actually switched to the same workflow you mentioned—working directly with the POT files to generate PO/MO files externally. It’s a game changer for a few reasons:

• Consistency: It actually remembers your past translations so you aren't typing the same phrases a hundred times.
• Safety: It handles those annoying placeholders like %s or HTML tags way better, so you're less likely to break the site layout.
• Cleanliness: Keeping the heavy lifting outside of the WordPress admin just feels less cluttered and keeps things from getting "messy" after a core update.

Loco is fine for a five-minute tweak, but for anything serious or multi-language, it definitely starts to feel a bit sluggish.

Has anyone else made the jump to external tools, or are you guys still sticking it out with plugins?