Thru-hole components are horrible, and I'm glad they've mostly gone the way of the dinosaur. Not only are they huge, they're harder to replace and frequently r

Thru-hole components are horrible, and I'm glad they've mostly gone the way of the dinosaur. Not only are they huge, they're harder to replace and frequently result in damage to the PCB. It's not too bad for resistors and capacitors, but ICs are the worst; the safest way to remove those is to use diagonal cutters and cut all the legs off the chip (destroying the chip of course), and then use your iron and a spring-loaded solder-sucker to remove the legs and the solder from the holes. You can forget about non-destructively removing an IC so you can re-use it. Sockets suck because they fail eventually, due to corrosion, thermal cycling, etc. Gold-plated sockets help, but these are expensive. And yes, the space is significant with PTH components. Surface-mount stuff is much, much easier to work with. The catch is that you need a hot-air rework station, but you can get a very decent Chinese-made one for less than $200. With one of these, you can easily replace SOIC/SOJ type ICs. The ones with 0.5mm lead spacing are very easy to work with; you can use some tweezers and a hot-air station to replace these chips easily, and just assembling a PCB with them is easy with a regular iron with a fine tip.