Beautiful case. Don’t be scared of surface mount - but it does help to have a few specialist tools. A cheap hot air station (Like the 858D that’s usally about $70), a good magnifier, some good fine tip tweezers (a lot of the hot air stations come with them free.) and a syringe of solder paste with some assorted sizes of luer lock tips…add in a little practice and you’ll be set 
If you want to step it up then a video microscope helps even more than a magnifier, and getting stencils to go with the boards eliminates the need for the syringe and makes it a LOT easier to get the right amount of paste on pads. That was the hardest part for me - learning how to dispense just the right amount of paste manually. Stepping up from my magnifier to a video scope helped with that a lot.
The MI boards might be a bit advanced for a first SMD project though. I’d suggest picking a smaller project or two to warm up on and get the technique down first.