Pat,
I did manual stretches, jelqs, and squeezes for 6 months and have recently started hanging. I got only small gains, 1/4 in length, 1/8 inch in girth, for those 6 months but felt that even with mimimal gains that I learned a lot in the process and that those exercise helped ready my penis for the stress of hanging.
Lots of folks have gained very nicely with only their hands as tools, with varying applications of time and intensity in their routines. Others, like myself, fall into the slow gains category have turned to hanging to try to move things along.
Either way, a general truism in PE (and in life for that matter) is that you are rewarded relative to the time, technique and effort put in, with variances determined by your own physiology.
Tally