Most of the time, if you are welding at your house, you are either fixing something that's rusty and paint covered, or you are building something new and unless you have a large shop, will also be covered in rust. So right off the bat you will have a ton of prep work before every weld if you were attempting to use mig. Any surface impurities will lead to porosity with mig, which makes the weld totally worthless, and will need to be completely removed before further passes because it will just keep bubbling up forever. Some corners can't be cleaned all the way on repairs, so once again any repair attempted with mig will likely be worse than it was before. If you are outside, or have the garage door open, or a fan on, or basically any air movement at all you run the risk of having your shielding gas blow away, leading to porosity. Basically, if something's not perfect, you have porosity. So in my opinion, unless you have 100 amp service to your shop, which is large enough to fit whatever you want to build in it with the door closed, or are doing light guage stuff, a mig is the wrong tool.
Stick welding has been around forever, and the technology really hadn't changed much. I'm sure you have heard it's harder to do, and that's true to a point. The most skilled welders in the world are still using stick and tig (which is done using a stick welder), but reaching that level of mastery isn't even close to needed to build and repair structural members. You may have heard it's slower, which is true in some situations. You've probably tried it, and simply striking an arc was hard as hell, and disorienting because you couldn't steady yourself enough to strike an arc and then find where you were gonna start welding in the first place. When you start learning, that's kinda how it feels. That's just because it's new to you, and you probably weren't taught the easy way to do all of this. Most of the people teaching other people to weld haven't actually done much welding themselves, so bullshit like striking a match to start an arc is still taught to everyone, and leads to generations of people arcing up everywhere except the weld itself lol. I'll cover all of that and more later, now I'm just trying to explain why stick welding should be what you are doing in the driveway, rather than mig.
Stick can be done just about anywhere, in almost any conditions. Hell it's even used under water. Wind doesn't bother it, so you can open the door and put the shop fan right by you. Rust and paint will still cause problems with certain rods, but other rods can eat right through light impurities. The machines are usually very simple, and easy to maintain for decades and generations. The rods are cheap, easy to aquire at almost any hardware store, and can change according to your needs instantly. You can weld al one minute, and then weld on steel the next, and then on to cast. The only thing you need to drag around the shop is one cord, and it doesn't have to be kept straight or even limited in length. You can weld uphill, downhill, overhead, whatever and make sound welds that are easily visually inspected. And believe it or not, can give a mig gun a run for its money on flat production style welds as far as speed is concerned up to about 300 amps. You can weld thin stuff, thick stuff, you can even use it to remove welds and excess material. You can cut with it in a pinch, and with the addition of an argon bottle and tig torch you can tig weld with a dc machine.
Most problems that people have stick welding is from improper rod selection for what they are doing, or using a cheap machine and not knowing what the limitations are and how to work around them. Some cheap machines are so terrible that i wouldn't even be able to weld with them. Harbor fright comes to mind. So please, don't waste your money. Buzz boxes come in two types, ac only and acdc. When stick welding, a dc arc is preferred for most rods, but even ac machines can perform fine with the proper rod selection. So in other words, a cheap Lincoln, Miller, or Hobart ac buzz box will work just fine. The thing that they lack is of course the dc, and the ability to really fine tune the heat. Knowing this, we can choose rods to work in these parameters, rather than attempting to use rods designed for more expensive dc machines.
7018 is pretty much considered the gold standard of welding rods. It's used for all structural work, and pipe welds in chemical plants, steam systems, power plants, nuclear plants, etc. It produces welds that are incredibly ductile, with almost negligible hydrogen, hence the nickname low hi (low hydrogen). What no one understands that doesn't weld in the mentioned places is that once you open a can of rods, they are only low hydrogen for a few hours unless you keep them in a specially designed oven to keep them completely dehydrated. So if you have owned an open can for more than a day, it is no longer low hydrogen. They still will weld ok, especially if you burn off the first 1/4 inch of the rod before starting to weld, but they will be prone to porosity at lower heat settings and will not deposit a low hydrogen weld. But for some unknown reason, everyone tries to use this rod to weld with, when in reality it's hardly needed for their application. Pipelines are not welded with low hydrogen electrodes, and before mig became common really nothing was. Everything made in a production setting used production rods, such as 7024, the 2 for flat position. In the field, 7024 is called jetrod, or monkey rod, because a monkey can literally make welds that look like a robot. The rod requires a slightly higher heat setting compared to different rods of the same size, but has iron powder in the flux to increase weld deposition. They also run better on ac, because the associated arc blow with dc can lead to a harder to control puddle. When using them, you simply light up, hold the rod in contact with the plate, and let it burn. In fact, they invented gravity welding to do it where an operator would man several fixtures designed to let the rods burn using gravity to feed them. Then even went so far as what's called firecracker welding, where they just laid them on the plate and struck an arc and let it burn on its own, sometimes with a few firebricks to hold it in place. If you have ever seen the super old school ship welding electrodes, that were as big as a pry bar, this is what they are used for. They make them in smaller sizes too, so if you have a buzz box, this should be your go to if its flat.