Personally, I've always found drag soldering easier than hot air for hand assembly of fine-pitch SMDs. I can do a 144 lead 0.5mm QFP in about 3 minutes. Most of that time is board prep (cleaning, fluxing, etc.) and positioning of the part. You also don't need a paste stencil for this which is handy. Touching up cold joints from automated assembly with hot air can be useful, though ideally you'll eventually get your process tuned to where it's largely unnecessary.
For removal, yes hot air is handy, or I'll just cut the leads off with an X-acto if I don't care about the part and don't want to risk cooking other stuff on the board badly. However, most of those little SMD rework stations with hot air just don't have enough volume to remove a part since you have to bring the whole thing up to reflow at the same time. I just use a heat gun. I have also seen nifty little workstations with bulk pre-heat air, typically applied to the bottom of the board, and then a handheld wand to bring it up the final 50-100 degrees. Those apparently work quite well.