I pretty much agree with what you are saying madasafish but grafting is as easy a method as any if you have reasonable hand eye coordination.
It is not expensive either as the individual cups cost about 30p each and the inserts 4p each. The cups are reusable.
The literature does try and make things seem far more complicated than they need to be.
The obvious advantage of grafting is the volume of queens you can produce for little effort and another is that grafts are resilient and dead easy to transport so you can go somewhere where there is good genetics in a colony, take a few grafts, then take them home to introduce to your cellraiser.
Bee improvement only really works at a group or association level as other than that it is every man for himself with the usual mish-mash of different sub species hybrisiding between each other.