lazy, congrats and awesome!!!!
first of all, some good advice about the extractor......i have two, a nine frame and and an 18 frame. extracting honey is always a great deal of work and worth the effort, or some type of small hand crank, it beats crush and strain, (never did this, never will) because, as you pointed out, it is a 'strain' on the bees. this year i used the 9 framer for 3 supers and one deep, it was a great deal of work to set up the equipment to harvest the honey from so few frames, but really worth the effort in the end. for a few frames i would probably invest in a small hand crank.
more bees? yeah!!!
about the bees you tried to smoke and brush off.........the smoke and brush method doesn't really work well. the bees don't like the brush, they get rolled and rather annoyed with this. the best way, if you are using this method is to get an extra box with an extra cover. frame by frame, remove a frame and shake, a hard shake, or two or three into the hive to remove as many bees as possible from the frame into the hive, and then brush the remainder gently off, and quickly remove to your extra covered box and sometimes it works better if that extra box is some distance away. even so the bees will quickly find that covered box.
i have never used bee escapes. i don't really have or want to take the time for these. think about purchasing a fume board and using fishers bee quick, bee dun or a product by one of our newer members honey b gone, to chase the bees out. the fume board combined with one of these products works well to chase bees out of the supers in minutes. sorry to hear you took so many stings.
btw, i sure would like to trade you for a jar of honey......! sent you a pm lazy.