I think I’ve seen Jim mention his “avoid solids” (and possibly Boolean operations) advice before, but that is one of those bits of advice that have me wondering “why would I do that?”
Your comment that making the individual surfaces is easier to troubleshoot may give a reason for that, though it also makes me wonder then how many other commands I should be avoiding. If a command like cylinder etc automates several lower level commands (circle, extrude planar curve) why would it be any less likely to work than manually executing those other commands? Is there something in them that occasionally causes an imperfect solid to be created?
I can appreciate that the software might get confused at times, such as with a complicated intersection flummoxing the fillet command (I see that in Alibre Design too) but I presumed that those primitive solid tools are doing things so basic that they should be as error free as anything could be.