I am pretty new to this myself and have been struggling with the same issue. Perhaps someone will have better input that we can both learn from. But I have had pretty good success using control points. I have also had a lot of frustration with the software crashing, or issues with alignment that I have learned to work through but would probably also require a small essay on the issues and solutions I found. It is probably a sign that I needed more photos that more closely tied together.
I have probably around 60 control points added at this point.
One thing that I have found is that focusing on adding control points and getting alignment closer in your primary model first is best. If your primary model has alignment inconsistencies and you try to make control points in other components trying to stitch them together it has caused problems for me in the past. But if you start focusing on your primary model with the most photos and start adding control points you will likely start finding areas that aren’t aligned very well. After you add some control points and then run an alignment again the primary model will be aligned better and will generally start including more and more photos. Then once it’s aligned reasonably well you can add the same control points to any other components that haven’t been rolled into the main one and it should align them.
If you get a crash, or if suddenly your model becomes inverted or aligned way off disable the control points added in the last alignment and start over.
If you are trying to align things and add too many new points to images that are very far out 100px+ and you run an alignment and something goes screwy try to reduce the number of control points that are far out. I have started to think of it like ironing. If you work out the creases slowly it will work but if you try to go for too big a change at once the fabric folds over it’s self and the model falls apart or RC crashes.