I'm also in the drag-solder camp. TSOP is way easier to hand solder for me, and I have found this out time and time again. I say this having just assembled a batch of boards totalling ~ 1000 components in the last two days; after the first couple boards, I set the damn stencil aside. It's partly my ineptitude at pasting a board, for sure. But the gap really isn't that big if you have perfected a drag-soldering setup.
Next time I order a stencil, I will be omitting leaded IC's from the stencil and just stencil pasting the passives and transistors. It's the IC's that ruin a stencil pasting. I can get a good paste on the passives 100% of the time, but I'm still at the point where I will get too much paste on the IC pads nearly half the time I do a stencil. (Also, with flex, some of your IC's will not connect because the board will flex in the oven! Yeah, you could tape everything down, but the return rate on the stencil for leaded IC's is already practically nil). Reworking the ICs due to too much paste requires more work than drag-soldering them in the first place. The one time you have to wipe off a board and restencil it, the one time a chip turns and lines up wrong due to too much paste, the inevitable inspection, flux, solderwick routine even when things go mostly right... this stuff eats up an enormous amount of time.
I am pretty sure stencil pasting is one of the least pleasant jobs around. Forget the pnp machines. Wake me up when someone creates an automated, self-cleaning stencil pasting machine.
Pace calls their drag-soldering tip a "wave soldering tip," for good reason. With a proper drag-solder tip that creates some surface-tension-induced suction, you're essentially doing precision wave resoldering. This is way more reliable and less labor-intensive on IC's than pasting, IME.
I can't get a hollow/spoon tip for my iron. A tinned face only bevel tip is the best I can get for my iron, and it works great for most all my SMD needs. A proper drag-solder tip sucks out bridges with ease, unless you severely overload with too much solder. A trick I just picked up on this last batch to avoid overfilling the iron is to overfill the decoupling cap pads. Then when you go back for the IC, you can lightly load the iron for drag-soldering by touching the decoupling caps.
I may have to check out those stencils for leadless parts, though. Pasting the IC, only, should make it easier to get a good paste without the cost and hassle of buying/machining a reference-flat cutting board custom sized for the board and using extremely stringent technique to get a good paste. Maybe it could be useful for individually pasting the IC's after doing a stencil for the passives. Again, I personally wouldn't bother for TSOP.
Sounds like I'm better off shopping for optics which is one area of my shop that is lacking.
Sounds like a good plan. When paste reflowing TSOP, you really need to visually inspect it, after. This is part of the reason hand-soldering is easier. You are inspecting it as you install the chip. When you're done soldering, you're done inspecting. I would ditch my reflow oven and paste solder before my microscope.