Glad to hear you got baseflight working. Once CF has an update that support rev6 the change won't be that hard. CF afterall started from baseflight but has added more features on and improved some things internally. But there's really nothing wrong with baseflight for the vast majority of people.
Tuning PID's is mostly just tedious. Our own FGA wrote what I think is one of the best descriptions of how PID's work here:
http://forum.flitetest.com/showthread.php?18939-Totally-boring-PID-info-don-t-read
ibcrazy just did a couple of good videos on PID tuning as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmc9Soci07A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP2WeA1dN8c
Sunday I started filming my own PID tuning video...but I'm hesitant to share it. My intention had been to just do a straight no edit video of myself tuning my Nighthawk 280 with baseflight. I usually use my phone with ezgui to tune, but the USB port on my phone is wearing out and no longer works with my usbotg cable so that wasn't an option. I tried to use my tablets..but they all had dead batteries. So I wound up using an ancient laptop - but it's screen was too dim to show up on camera. So I've got about a 35-40 minute video of me tuning but you can't really see what I'm doing (I do describe it and read out the numbers but without the screen visible I'm really disappointed in the video.) I only had two batteries ready to fly though and drained them both without getting a final tune - so I'll probably try again this weekend to get better footage.
But that gives some perspective on it. Flying gently I can get about 5-8 minutes of flight on those batteries. Flying both of them like that I recorded nearly 45 minutes of footage. Tuning is a lot of short flights and trying out different changes.
When you're first learning big changes are nice since you'll see how they change things. But for "real tuning" it's the tiny little changes that really get things dialed in...and that means a lot of back and forth.
You can setup in-flight tuning which is a bit more complex to setup...and honestly I don't feel coordinated enough to fly and adjust things at the same time so I've never really messed with it.
One of the things I absolutely love about TauLabs over Base/Cleanflight is how well it's autotune works. It's not perfect...but it gets things very close and then just one pack of tuning I usually have a tune I'm VERY happy with.
All that said - there's also something to be said for default settings. I've been flying the nighthawk for two months on the default settings which are baseflight defaults. They're not great...but they're totally flyable both by experienced pilots and noobs.
So don't stress over tuning too hard. Adding a bit of extra RCrate and Roll/Pitch/Yaw rate will give you the ability to do flips and really toss things around - as long as you don't have any major oscillations I'd say just go out and fly and worry about tuning later once you feel like your piloting skills have plateaued and you need another kick in performance