Soldering fine-pitch SMT stuff by hand is a piece of cake, I do it on a regular basis and personally would rather do that than spend the time soldering a gazillion separate pins with a soldering iron. I can understand why many fear it though, it took me a while to take the plunge but once I did I didn't look back.

Search youtube for reflow soldering, there are lots of videos. Dab on the solder paste, plop the parts in place with tweezers and fire up the hotplate (or modified toaster oven). When the paste melts into liquid solder and flows, shut it off and let it cool. Inspect closely for bridges and clean up any that formed with some wick and presto, it's done. If you get a solder template made it's even easier but so far I've only done it by hand. Temperature controlled hotplate cost me about 40 bucks to build but I've seen it done with an electric griddle. Even small scale production runs are possible since depending on the size of the hotplate, numerous boards can be reflowed at once. Different, yes, hard, no.

As I said earlier though, I would love to see *any* dependable, working, open source SCSI-to-whatever converter come onto the scene. Once the basics are done, others can build upon it.