My experience has been that there is nearly always a plugin for what you're attempting to do but they're hard to find (mostly because of naming) or they're poorly coded or missing features. Thankfully, most of them are GPL'd so you're pretty free to do whatever you want with them.
In my former life as a freelance contractor, I found that reaching for a bottle at this point has much to recommend it; my usual regimen was roughly one ounce of Calvados, to one eight-ounce cup of strong black coffee, per hour. I found this to provide sufficient anesthesia to do what was necessary, without closely approaching the point of being too drunk to hack the sort of repulsively godawful PHP code which necessitates such anesthesia in the first place.
