Haha, welcome to rigging! It's pretty much a pain in the ass process. You just have to figure out how to rig what bones to what parts of the model to get it to look right. There aren't really any ways of making it easier; however, you could try using weight paint mode to assign bones to faces a little more quickly.

One other thing you could do if you're feeling ambitious is to import a character animation (so that your character isn't in the ref pose) in order to see how your model will look like before compiling.