Not that a lot of that can't be done DIY, but to do really good quality boards at home you start to spend a lot more time refining manufacturing processes than actually doing electronics! That's fine if that's your jam, it's a valid hobby, but I'm much more interested in making more interesting projects!

For production quantities, I use JLCPcb (China) with Airborne for shipping (so it doesn't take a month to get here). Their quality is very good. Pay the extra $20 and get a stencil to make paste application easy. It's worth it. I think my last order of 50 board roughly 2.5x3.5" with a metal stencil came to about $70 total with an additional $30 for 3-5 day shipping via Airborne.

That's why I made a lot of boards myself as described in my comment - I get film exposed at professional house that does it for offset printing, and this is pretty fast and cheap (about $3-$4). I pick it up myself. The rest is done with photosensitive 3M dry film and Chinese wet soldermask. Drilling on DIY CNC.

Sometimes I get 4 revisions in the pipeline where 3 versions I haven't even received yet are already obsolete and go right from the mailbox to the trash.

Even the 4 layer board processes are not set up for good power integrity. They have a center core for layers 2 and 3, with 1 and 4 as foils. It ought to be two cores with prepreg between, giving the low impedance for internal power planes.

Generic fiberglass is NOT consistent across multiple mfgrs enough that you can spec it for mass production from any mfgr in any country at any time, you need the very low variation specified "RF PCB material" to mass produce precision untuned hairpin microwave filters.

HOWEVER, the cool part of the project was generic fiberglass is consistent enough across one mfgr over a short period of time, that you can characterize product X shipped from PCB house Y and then you can very consistently get boards at the proper resonant frequencies.

The meme was not overly successful in the amateur radio microwave community, sadly, but the project did work perfectly well at the time.

WRT vias there is a circular problem going on with thermal vias. If you're building a shipping product with qty 10K+ and running into tight financial and thermal constraints the only way out sometimes is a field of vias perfectly flat with the silicon soldered to it and the vias dump the heat, neither air or PCB laminate are good enough thermal conductors.

So if you're building at home and want to pretend to be extremely constrained then you can manually perform the mass production steps necessary to use vias as heatsinks.

However the more rational less circular way to solve the heat problem for onesie-twosie construction projects at home is to think outside the box and bit and throw money at the problem. You can't afford a 50 cent heatsink on some consumer products but I certainly can afford fifty cents in some one-off thing I'm bodging together on my workbench at home. Or say you need squeaky clean power for a low level analog project, well, instead of crazy PCB tricks to dump all the heat in one 7805, dump some of the heat in a switcher running at 9 or so volts and have the linear reg turn noisy 8 V into clean 5V. The "CMRR" equivalent datasheet value for a boring old linear from the 70s is like 80 to 100 dB from memory so it'll be clean enough for analog work. If you try adding a $2.50 switcher to the BoM at work on a qty 100K project "to get out of needing thermal vias" your boss will have a quarter million dollar heart attack, but at home on a qty 1 project that $2.50 is like a rounding error and I just don't care. Or bodge in a beast of a heatsink if you need silence. Or bodge in a fan if you can afford the acoustic and possible electrical noise.

Now if you're trying to "Work at Home" and do a prototype, just while at home, then you have to work as if you're at work.

There are some nifty microwave ICs that as usual turn 99% of their input power into heat and they might "Need" to push all their heat thru a little grounded field of vias. Even that can be bodged using a milling machine and lathe if you make a roundish hole and plug it with a solid slug of copper. Remember labor cost at home for hobby projects is $0/hr, so something that would add ten minutes manual labor to a million product production run is perfectly acceptable at home but unthinkable at work if you can just use vias.

There are linear regulators that are better in this regard though (LT3042 is my favourite for high PSRR).

I made my last homemade board, some kind of electronic music circuit, in 1993. Today, there are so many interesting chips that are sold as breakout boards by Adafruit, Sparkfun, and the like, that it's easy to prototype by just stringing wires between boards. For the next level -- has to be nice but not commercial and not on my own nickel -- ExpressPCB is my friend.

Trick 1: If you align all your holes on a 2.54mm pitch grid (which will be easy enough if you're doing a through-hole design) you can tape or clamp some spare protoboard on top before drilling. That will then act as a jig, getting all your holes nicely lined up with one another.

Trick 2: Drill the holes before you mask the board. This is particularly easy if you're drawing out the board by hand, with etch-resist pen.

You you can also make a simple probe for autoleveling and mill the pcb too, but imo it takes too much time. Etching has way better quality too.

I haven't done it with PCB, but for wood when I need a precise location and have no drill press, I use a nail to make an indentation and use my smallest drill bit to drill it through, then I can use progressively larger bits, as they will tend to self-center in the hole.

Get a small drilling stand that can let you mount the PCB in a vise.

Now, I would still use pre-drilled prototyping board. Drilling all those holes is just such a hassle. I want to focus on designing circuits and boards, not drilling them.

I drill rarely, when the component must be mounted directly to the prototyping board but does not conform to standard 2.54mm pitch or will not fit the premade holes.