I wouldn't worry too much about a few thousand VLOOKUPS, especially when the workbook recalcs in under a minute.
I once inherited a workbook with hundreds of thousands of VLOOKUPS that took over 40 minutes to recalculate. Not a typo. Minutes. I got it down to about 40 seconds by converting the approach. It took a couple of hours to change the approach.
Maybe it's just me, but I prefer to simplify the logic when building IF formulas, breaking out the calculation type work into separate cells, and then referencing those cells in the IF. Not only does it make it easier to review (and build) ALL of the formulas in the sheet, but because of how Excel recalculates it often helps to improve recalculation performance. See the comments on
volatile functions. I've seen references that say that the INDEX function is not volatile, despite what some MS documentation says. My results back that up.
And no, I don't know of any better options for the IF and the Boolean functions. So long as you
understand what you're building, you won't get surprises using those.
I'm self-taught too. You're definitely on the right track and are asking the right questions. Keep it up!
