The most common workarounds are for folks coming in with an Excel mindset (where operations are cell-level) who want to accomplish something that is easy in Excel but hard in Tableau. For instance, almost everything in Tableau is an aggregation, so displaying a simple unaggregated table is actually really hard (you have to make certain fields Dimensions, others Values, etc).
In Tableau, almost every operation maps to some SQL operation (in fact, you can peek at the underlying SQL query if you run the profiler), so mastery of Tableau almost always entails mastery of deep SQL concepts.
Why doesn't Tableau make easy things easy, say like Excel does? The trouble is Excel’s reactive cell level operations don't scale. Tableau lets you connect to massive backend databases to compute and display multifaceted viz's with relatively high performance, and the only way it can accomplish this is to restrict itself to SQL-friendly operations.
This difference is philosophically analogous to using for loops vs vectorized operations - the latter requires a mindset shift, and is less flexible/granular than the former but you gain a tremendous performance boost.
I have really struggled with some “easy” stuff in Tableau and gave up. But rephrasing it’s strengths and weaknesses around mindset and to think about it more like sql sounds like a good approach that I’ll try next time I meet it.
There is to my knowledge no way to automate edition of workbooks. You are in for GUI repetitive soul sucking task. Bonus pain if "workaround" are involved. (Just have a look at the support forum... well not the good time they just revamped it... many answer involve 10+ manuals GUI steps)
I still use it, overall still pretty good at what it does best. But I'm actively seeking alternative.