A bit frustrated, I'm already a noob at the whole LaTeX thing. Don't want extra hoops.

Is the whole thing really so fragile and precarious that laypeople should never ever bother with it?
( Dependencies and whatnot, whatever)

If not, what's the approach of the maintainers? What goes where? Et cetera.

If I can install personal stuff as my personal user account, that would be best, so yeah.
How does this work?

TeX Live is not a difficult install, and has everything you will need for using LaTeX. There's a SlackBuild for it on SBo, but the official installer lets you cleanly install it to a directory (for a single user if that's what you want). I use the official installer and install system-wide to /usr/local/texlive, but you could also do that under your home dir, or you could try the SlackBuild which I'm sure is good too.

I have texlive installed, I just want to know how to add LaTeX packages to the installation without tlmgr.

Let's apply this to Slackware.
I would not be asking how to install Slackware, I would be asking how to install Slackware packages without the package tools like installpkg.

The fact that there is an "extras" package with extra stuff for Texlive, which, again, comes without the tlmgr, means that the maintainers of the slackbuilds/packages know a way to install packages without tlmgr.

Unless they actually DO use tlmgr and simply not package it for the end user, aka, in this case, I.

What packages are you trying to install? TeX Live is massive and comes with just about everything you could need. But if you really need to add new packages, you should be able to put them in your TEXMFHOME:

will tell you where that is. The TEXMFHOME location "is the recommended location for personal macro files or packages".

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Thanks, the package was kinda niche (a gurps typesetting package I wanted to try out).