SO overwhelming, I agree! When I did ours, I used
Cindy's Mega 2 Universal Album and deleted all of the elements, so it was just papers, cards, pictures & words (and stitching, I think). It took me over fifteen hours of work to get my photos edited and placed in the pages, but I did it all while I was traveling, so it didn't seem so overwhelming.
Your plan to scrap your favorite photos and put the rest in pocket pages sounds like a good plan. You could spend half an hour a day working on it so that little by little you get it done.
Here's my album:
Disney 2014
Here's a sample
