I have a bit of experience hand-assembling pcb with a lot of small SMD parts. I would think it depends on your time and other workload and what skills and equipment you have. And what you like to do. Some people will not enjoy this process, at all.
If you have the time and desire to slog through it and learn as you go, a $1000 budget could buy a stereo microscope, a pickup tool, a hot air station, an automated reflow oven, years worth of flux and paste, and a couple extra boards to screw up and learn on. Time is the unavoidable factor, because you will need a fair bit of it to learn what you can and can't do (and end up with a working board). Heck, it can take weeks to even get a stereomicroscope workstation setup, comfortably.
If you have hard deadlines, you could shelve the idea. But maybe buy an extra board and components to try your hand at. You might find, in the process, that some of your component layout/orientation and selection, thermal pad design/strategy, and other random things could be better tweaked to help you assemble your pcbs with your particular methods and equipment in the future.
Honestly, in the end, I personally feel like the stereomicroscope and a DMM are the most important physical tools for this task. And a scope, perhaps, depending on the board. Along with some debugging skills (which you probably are the best at, on your own board), there's pretty much nothing you can't fix as long as you can actually see what you're doing with good lighting and magnification. But you can easily underestimate the amount of sheer space and organizational energy that you will need to dedicate to your workspace in order to assemble and test/debug a pcb of any complexity.