My uncle ran a muffler shop in Lubbock for 30 years and never owned a single air tool. He had one of those old school speed handles and a ratchet he bought in 1978, still used it till the day he retired. I asked him once why he never went pneumatic and he said the compressor noise gave him a headache and he liked feeling when a bolt was about to give. He also said he could tell if a thread was cross starting just by the sound of it. Kid in your story reminds me of him. Something to be said for working slow enough to hear what the metal is telling you.

Do you remember when everyone swore by those auto tone buttons in Lightroom and then got mad when the sky turned orange? I had the same arc with AI noise reduction a while back, spent a whole weekend complaining that skin looked like melted plastic, then realized if I dialed the slider back to like 30 percent and kept the original layer underneath, it was actually solid. The whole game changed for me once I stopped expecting the tool to read my mind and started using it like a rough draft I could paint over. People forget these things are guessing at what you want, and guessing is fine as a first pass, just don't let a guess be the last word. So yeah, a starting point is exactly the right way to look at it.