You probably misunderstood. Dead bug does not mean creating entire circuit out of PCB. Dead bug is a single chip you put on its back (hence, dead) so that you c

You probably misunderstood. Dead bug does not mean creating entire circuit out of PCB. Dead bug is a single chip you put on its back (hence, dead) so that you can get EASY access to its pad. This is only very small number of cases (I did TWO this year), for everything else I have selection of adapters and development tools to make my life easy. It doesn't cost a lot more of effort to solder a single SMT chip this way. I already solder everything else to the board anyway so cutting couple pieces of wire to tack them one by one does cost maybe couple additional minutes for a small size chip, and then I can go to working on the rest of the prototype.