I'd recommend that a beginner go with the iron. It's all too easy to overheat components with a hot air gun, unless you have one with excellent temperature control. Even then, you need to be aware of accidentally desoldering nearby components.

I've got pretty bad essential tremor (and bad eyeseight), so I was also wondering, what's a good way to keep the chips in place on the board? I was thinking of using a tiny dab of superglue.

I am in a similar boat and I've found the easiest solution is to just find a friend who is better at soldering and a case of beer.

Even with practice I'm orders of magnitude slower than people with steady hands.

I guess I figure you don't have to be good at something for it to be worthwhile. As a human, no matter how steady your hand or sharp your eye, you're always going to be inferior in manufacturing basically anything than our new robotic overlords.

The main thing I like about electronics is it makes me feel at home in a world of technology that's kinda crazy alien at least half of the time. Being able to interact with it in a proactive way makes it something I can get a grip on, even if, when we're frank, my soldering is shit.