Am I just stupid, or are technic sets unbelievably punishing to build?

My son had a Lamborghini something drivable Car for christmas. He also had another bright green Lamborghini technic set a few months back. Each time I have built these with him, I have gotten maybe 100 pages in and found I can't make something fit, and upon examining the instruction picture to our own build found that we have installed one frame 1 slot off of what it should have been. This results in literally needing to disassemble our build dozens and dozens of steps back to correct the...