@david_chisnall @skaphle @debcha @rednikki @sundogplanets Yes.. It's a trade off based on how often that's something you need to do in your field. But also just rewriting those fifty citations isn't *that* much work if it happens less than 3-4 times a year, I find after some practice the average citation takes a couple minutes max to write and for fifty citations I'd spare 3-4 hours to get them sorted out if the target format was unfamiliar. I think I could fairly easily do 50 in 2 hours if its Chicago/Turabian.
I used to easily waste more than a few hours a month getting Zotero etc to behave and to fix my citations doing my master's thesis. And the citations still turned out like shit in the end... because fixing metadata and checking generated results is more hassle than checking the references directly and I was too burnt out to do another round of it near the end.
I am in history now and don't expect to have to do that kind of rewriting that often. We don't publish that often, to boot, and by and large Chicago/Turabian is what everyone uses. But I do understand there are fields with multiple common styles and much more rapid turnout of material and manual citations may bog you down for most writing.