A couple of times, I've heard Gerry Sussman at MIT (SICP author) give a talk on how bipolar transistor circuits are actually designed. You don't use SPICE or mesh analysis except in unusual circumstances (e.g. non-linear circuits) or to fine tune a completed design.
As an example, a bias design goes something like this: "Let's see, I'll pin the base at five volts with a resistor divider. The emitter will be 0.6V below that. Then the emitter current will be (5.0 - 0.6) divided by the emitter resistor. The collector current will be essentially the same, so I can pick the collector load resistor to give me an appropriate quiescent point and make sure the output impedance is less than a tenth of the input impedance of the following stage (so I can ignore the latter)."