I'm new to automation testing and writing Appium UI tests in Python for Android.
I want to add checks after each section of my test to verify each step passed:

• Login (3 screens: Username/Password → OTP → PIN, all 3 must pass to consider login successful)
• Upload Documents (5 mandatory documents to upload)
• Fill in around 15 mandatory fields grouped into 3 sections (Hospital Details, Claim Details, Claim Benefits)
• Submit the claim

I found 2 ways to do this:

Option 1 — Plain assert
- Simple and easy to understand. But the test stops immediately at the first failure so I won't see the other failures until I fix and re-run.

Option 2 — SoftAssert class
- I find it more complicated for begginer like me to set up but collects ALL failures and reports them together at the end, so I can see everything that failed in one single run.

My questions:
1. Which one do you recommend for beginners?
2. Which is easier to maintain long term?
3. Is there a better/standard way I'm missing?
4. When should I move from plain assert to SoftAssert?

Context: Python 3.11, Appium 2.x, no pytest yet (plain .py script), solo learner.

Thanks!