So a couple of years ago, I made my first font, Yagi Double. Then I wanted to hint it, got scared when I saw the amount of work involved. Now I'm ready to try again but it STILL seems too tedious, like I'm missing something. What I've read so far on the subject:
http://www.rastertragedy.com/
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=NotesOn...

As I understand it, you come up with an array of numbers representing the location of stuff like the baseline, cap height, x-height, etc. You feed these into two different areas in Fontlab. With an inline font like this, there are twice as many of these numbers. It's a lot of hassle.

1. Does this really produce good hinting results at the end, if I could force myself to do it properly?

So,

My first font. So far I made all the glyphs of all the 6 families of my font and spaced them as best as I could. Created oldstyle-, ornament-, smallcaps-, ligatures- and discretionary ligature features.

Now come the tidious part I understand. Kerning. What is the best way to go about it??
I was thinking about beginning to kern the Capital A next to lowercase glyphs with classes.
then B, C, etc. etc.

Question 1:
If I do it this way, can I work with classes in the kerning panel? Like this:

_kern1: A' @_lc @_sc

Question 2:

If I want to kern the lowercase a next to the capital A, do I have to drag in all of the a-diacretics symbols as well? Or do those composite glyphs just follow a when it is kerned