The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.

It's a long time since I wrote any assembly in anger, but I don't remember this being an issue. Back then Id be writing 2D and 3D graphics demos. Reasonably complex things, but the challenge was always getting it fast enought to keep the frame rate up, not code structure.

As you say, I think you just establish patterns to decompose the problem.