Though hole has... well... holes. It requires tediously placing all your stuff through those holes.

SMD on the other hand, can be solder-pasted and then baked with a $20 skillet + hot air gun to finish off the last bits. The solder has surface tension and naturally "pulls" pieces into place.

SMD is slightly more expensive than a soldering iron: you still need the soldering iron for some bits. And solder paste goes bad over time, and flux to keep stuff clean. You'll also need more expensive PCBs with a solder mask if you want to keep things easiest (but its really not that much more expensive: most costs seem to be shipping costs these days).

So you get your skillet (or toaster oven), a hot air gun, soldering iron, solder wire, solder paste, and finally flux... and you're pretty much set.

Maybe get some "desoldering" pump and "desoldering braid", in case you need to rework some stuff. But the skillet + hot air gun works pretty well.

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Work with larger 0805 resistors/capacitors. They look small at first, but you can probably work at that level even without tweezers. More skilled people can work with 0402 and smaller pieces (though that's entering tweezer-only territory)

If 0805 is too small, there are larger pieces available like 1206. But I personally think 0805 sufficiently large for beginners to work with.

EDIT: I'm talking about American codes. 0805 American is equivalent to 2012 European.