Nine hours on a free table sounds like a bad trade to me, your call though.

Honestly the $120 shop price was probably the smarter move here. Doing a heat gun job on a phone at home is how you end up with a cracked back glass and a dead left edge, which is exactly where you are now. Those ribbon connectors are press-fit with almost no room for error, and most of them want a steady hand and the right jig, not plastic pry tools and hope. You may have saved ninety bucks but you traded it for a half working phone and a connector that might be closer to broken than you think. Paying someone who does this daily is not a waste of money when the part is that small and that easy to wreck.

Heard a drywall guy on a podcast say lifts are mostly a ceiling thing and walls are still faster with two people, though he did say tall walls over 10 feet change that. Watched a video where a guy did a whole tall wall solo with one and it looked slow but doable. Kinda makes me want to try it on the next tall wall just to see.