You're going to waste more time setting things up by hand. It's also error prone, and when you have to replicate things across environments (dev, test, prod, at a minimum), you'll spend a ton of time figuring out what you missed.

The console is really only meant for prototyping. AWS should really emphasize this more.

As an aside: argonaut sets everything up using terraform (everything is autogenerated from templates), though the tf code itself is not yet exposed to users. We're working on that functionality soon.

Well, that's likely the issue. You're spending more time avoiding doing it the way that will make everything go more smoothly