Professionally I've been using Weller soldering irons for the last twenty years. Our technician uses them for soldering flight equipment.
Most of our boards have some surface mount components on now, and most of the large stupidly expensive components are surface mount.
When a device costs £20000, you don't quibble about the cost of the soldering iron however!
(We don't use sockets on flight hardware (i) because it's unnecessary mass (ii) it's another single point of failure (iii) we'll rarely be in a position to replace a component anyway (iv) there's a good chance it wouldn't tolerate the vibration testing, unmanned spacecraft launches are vicious).
Generally when a component has to be removed from a flight board, we'll cut the legs off carefully, and remove them individually, to minimise any damage to the PCB tracks. We
really don't like doing things like that though.
We don't use devices like BGAs (Ball Grid Array) and CCGAs (Ceramic Column Grid Array), because they're damned near impossible to reliably solder by hand, you need very specialised and expensive equipment, and even then, it's impossible to visually inspect the joints, you really need to X-Ray the board, which is a damned nuisance. Mostly we can live with large CQFP (Ceramic Quad Flat Pack), but they can eat up board space.
Our technician has a fairly big bit of optical kit for looking at boards whilst working on them.
(Apologies for the piss poor camera phone image).
