I thought the Payment Intents and associated information about SCA had a learning curve, but was well documented. I think the aspect you're missing is that you

I thought the Payment Intents and associated information about SCA had a learning curve, but was well documented. I think the aspect you're missing is that you don't need to decide, necessarily, when to use Payment Intents. You use only that API, and if there's an additional step required on the user's end, you'll get a different "state" in the response https://stripe.com/docs/payments/intents https://stripe.com/docs/payments/intents