Does it have to be this complicated and manualy demanding? There is so many things and it feels like many could be automated.
It's not always this complicated, and I agree that it should be automated to some extent (that's pretty high on my python to-do list), but once you have the process down it should be fairly straightforward. The problem with fully automating it is that the details will need to be different for every model. If I find a good solution and write that script, I'll post it to the CGC resources.