Hi Jesse, definitely a manual fillet (by this meaning a surface/surface fillet which you trigger by doing a fillet between 2 individual completely separated surfaces) can help to finish a model that has these issues.

But it is isn't anywhere near as convenient as the edge one, because you'll end up with a bunch of fillet surfaces which you will have to manually trim yourself, and then figure out how to connect them at the corners.

So it isn't really very good for quick "sketching" type stuff, there is a lot more nitty-gritty work involved. But it will often times give you a way to make forward progress in finishing a difficult fillet instead of just not being able to make any progress at all.

- Michael