And they suck to do manually. I started this morning off by hand-stuffing some PC boards with (among other parts) 19x 0402 resistors per board.

There was a reason I did it before I had any coffee!

Ha ha, try hand placing 01005. Literally specs of black pepper. Must use ceramic tweezers due to residual magnetism in even the highest quality, demagnetized stainless. I was placing them between BGA balls to solve a noise issue.

The lady I have hand building my boards can place 0201 all day. Pretty amazing.

The company I ised to work for would sometimes buy components from RS. They'd supply them in strips of 10, 50, or 100.

The pick and place machine needed blank strip of about ten components (just for lead-in on the cassete).

Transfering components from one tape to another was really annoying. And one of the bosses just did not understand that the fractions of a penny saved were obliterated by time wasted moving components over.

And until you've had to do something like that you can't really understand the benefit of $60 Swedish tweezers.

Yep #00 Swiss tweezers. Nothing like them. The feel of the #00 is just right.

They aren't too hard with paste and an oven/hot air.

Point I was trying to make wasn't about reflow. Picking them up and placing by hand gets tiring after the first 2 dozen or so.

Especially if your near-vision is starting to go...