I am not gonna go through all that BS, not for this prototype, I wanna get this done !!!
KiCad used to be quite simple minded and easy to use, but over the last few years ever more "advanced" features have been added, and more are comming. (There are over 500 feature requests on gitlab).
And most features are not very difficult to learn, I find KiCad quite straightforward, but I've been using it for 8+ years (although i have not made very many PCB's with it) and my knowledge of KiCad grew gradually with the program itself.
And both ERC and DRC are there to help you. KiCad V7 has gotten a lot more checks, and not all checks are useful for everybody. It is however easy to exclude individual warnings/errors, or whole classes of warnings/errors by right clicking on them in the ERC or DRC dialogs. (The excluded violations can also be easily undone)
i usually proofread it by looking at the print out traces with the data sheets and a marker
Mistakes like shorting a diode though it's body with a wire are easy to make and hard to spot. A good tool for checking netlist connectivity in the schematic is to use the highlight function, which is (by default) under the backtick key (upper left corner of the keyboard on US layout, just under [ESC].)
Rushing a project though KiCad without spending some time on learning KiCad itself does not sound like a good idea to me. There are so many nice things in KiCad that spending some time to learn them (such as for example the "No Connect Flags" already mentioned) helps boosting your productivity to get things done more effectively.