What's the easiest way to download data over a long temporal range?

I'm new to PlanetScope and to mapping. My question is which is the easiest and most time efficient way to download my site data from Planet?

I find using the Planet Explorer clear and easy to use, and it lets me clip the image data to just my sites, which is very good as it prevents me from going over my quota. However, I want to download the data for my sites across their whole temporal range (2016 to present day). As far as I can tell, the explorer won't let me do this easily as I have to manually click each scene and press the "load more" button.

I've also tried using the official Planet plugin for QGIS. It is cool that it loads Planet data directly into QGIS, but I don't see any option to crop scenes down to just the pixels I want. I also don't see the option to bulk select scenes within a date range.

Lastly, I've attempted to use the APIs that Planet provides, but this is challenging because I'm only familiar with the R programming language, so I keep encountering errors. Furthermore, in the interactive Jupyter notebook (https://github.com/planetlabs/notebooks/blob/master/jupyter-notebooks/data-api-tutorials/search_and_download_quickstart.ipynb), there's a bug in cell 4, line 2, as the "requests" module is unavailable. I keep experiencing the same issue when I try to run the authentication API (API Mechanics (planet.com)). All in all, I am finding this also to be a difficult experience.

So I don't know what the best option for me is to download the data that I want in a timely manner. Can someone please suggest a workflow which will enable me to get the data I need?