The cool kidsTM like to use toaster ovens with thermocouples to bake their own surface mount boards at home. I've been exploring doing that using boards that I make on a CNC locally. The joy of designing in the morning and having the working product in the evening. It seems SOIC size is ok, but smaller SMT IC packages currently present an issue. This gives interesting fodder for how to increase precision down further. Doing SOIC and SMD LED/Resistors from a sub $1k CNC machine isn't too bad though IMHO. And unlike other pcb specific CNC machines I can also cut wood and metal with my machine :-p
Time to stock up on some SOIC microcontrollers for some full board productions. It will be very interesting to see if I can do an SMD usb connector. Makes it a nice complete black box to do something and talk ROS over USB.
