Smart, dynamic, automatic placement of figures in Beamer

I recently switched to LaTex for document preparation. I’ve been using Beamer in the last few weeks. While I can make the slides look good, it requires many rounds of trial and error processes to have an acceptable layout. The energy and time involved is really discouraging.

Particularly, I feel that placing figures in a frame can be a pain. Especially when I try to include more than one column or more than one figure. I had to adjust the size of the figure (percentage of textwidth, or textheight) many times in order to place them nicely. I wonder if there is a way to automate the process. Say, if I have a figure and a bullet list, when I use that magic (a macro/snippet), the column widths for the figure and the bullet list will be automatically determined.

Such a method may not exist, please share your thoughts on how to use LaTex more efficiently to prepare slid shows.

Thank you!