Actually, SMT isn't that bad. Most people, with a steady hand, can even learn to solder fine pitch chips if the lay off the caffeine. The hardest part is the test fixtures. Something like a Genrad, custom incircuit, or HP 3070 Series, with the proper fixtures and schematics is all that's required for component repair. The hard part is the boards themselves. Some will have burnt traces.
Heck, get a nice heatflow, and it's even easier to replace chips.
I've had more luck with the tiny heated air systems/pens and just gently lifting on the chip with long tweezers. Careful application of a good quality (Read: Kestrel) solder paste with a toothpick on the pins of the new device and reheat/reflow the thing pack in place.
I do so little of it though, that the paste dries out. I hear keeping it in the fridge works great, but wife isn't so keen on using the butter dish door as a solder-paste holder...
The problems are mostly as you say, from caffeine/shaky fingers. And a nice well-lit bench and magnifier or those goofy-assed magnifying goggles that never play nice with my eyeglasses, helps tons.
Another problem with resistors/capacitors smaller than 0208 or maybe 0206 is that one good sneeze will send your parts inventory everywhere...
Some of the really small stuff is also an inhalation hazard if you're a heavy mouth-breather when gawking at a tiny surface-mount board. Very bad juju if a component takes up residence in a lung.
I should post a photo of the "repair" someone did to the RF traces on a GE MASTR II RF power amp's board-printed Wilkinson divider/combiner right after the high-power RF transistor torched it, that's currently on-air from my basement as a link radio. A lovely shaky hand job with a silver pen.
I was amazed when the thing still worked after a one-week key-down test into my 500W Bird dummy-load, after what I thought would turn out to be a bad eBay purchase, so I decided to put it on-air and see how long the nut-job golden-screwdriver fix lasted.
It's going on 5 years of heavy-duty service with the power backed off to 65W (EIA/TIA rated at 100W continuous-duty). No spurs, no problems. Amazingly bad "repair" seems to be going to hold up until the thing takes a lightning hit or power surge during a thunderstorm.
Granted, it ain't no surface-mount small gear, but it proved to me that sometimes really ugly burnt-trace fixes do sometimes work.
On the other hand, I had one once that burnt the board to board "jumper" area so badly that the board had almost zero resistance across that gap, and every time it was keyed it would arc in the burnt area no matter how nice a path I'd made for the happy little electrons. I gave up after repair attempt number three, pulled the hard-to-find components off the board and scrapped it.