I’ve done a lot of this, and my technique eventually evolved into making rough surfaces using projected curves, creating surfaces from those curves, simplifying them as much as possible, and point editing to match the surface to tolerance.
It’s the hard way, IMO, but nothing else I’ve tried has really gotten me there. I bought VSR for this purpose when it was on sale, but then we started doing all of our design in the box.
Once blend and match with history become a reality, this method will be so much faster. Still, it’s going to take a lot of trial and error to get a good workflow.
As @ec2638 says, breaking your model up into logical sections is important.