Not knowing exactly what equipment Jon (the OP) currently has it's hard to make a recommendation. Most wood comes as either nominally 3/4" smooth planed or 1"+ rough sawn. So how do you get down to the desired 1/4" thick? A hand plane certainly doesn't sound like a good way to be removing 1/2" of material.
If my project was smallish boxes I might want highly figured wood. My experience with my 12 Powermatic planer highly figured wood didn't plane well with it's changing grain directions. Birds eye maple would chip out at the eyes. When we started doing lots of figured wood I bought the narrowest Italian thickness belt sander I could find. That sander would chew right through the worst wood with no issues. The thought of hand planing doesn't appeal to me.
I mentioned before using a hand held router to surface boards like the slab table makers do. That's a well proven way with a homemade jig setup. A similar method can be done on a table saw by supporting the blank on both edges and running over a dado blade. With both these methods final finish can be achieved with light scraping and/or sanding.
Investing in hand planes would be so far down on the list of possible methods it wouldn't even be a consideration for me.
The local woodcraft has small dimensional wood. Lots of exotics, like ebonies, rosewoods, various colored woods (redheart, yellowheart, osage orange, etc.) They have pieces usually 2-4 feet long, 2-4 inches wide, anywhere from 1/2" thick down to 1/16th in some cases. I have...I guess its mostly 2 foot long 2-3" wide, an 1/4" or 1/8" thick. So I don't necessarily have to plane the boards to thickness. My main interest was hand planing to smooth, as the boards are often not smooth...with clear snipes, waviness, etc. that are characteristic effects of rapidly shoving tons of boards into a thickness planer without a lot of care. 🤷‍♂️
I have one router...its big, bulky, and not easy to use handheld. I am not particularly proficient at it, and I am wary of using it on thin stock, say 1/8" thick? I mean, the stock is already flat, it just doesn't necessarily have a nice clean surface, and occasionally one end is a bit warped. I usually try to pick boards with two key characteristics: great grain, and minimal to no warping. I've had a couple of these pieces for close to a year (or maybe over a year now), and they must not have been 100% dry, as they are very slightly warped in some places. But for the most part, most of these boards are small, flat, and pretty much ready...they usually just have kind of a janky surface quality. Certainly not the kind I'd want to use in a product I would sell.
I can get some photos to show what I'm talking about, and why I was thinking hand planing was probably the best way to deal with the issue.
Jokes aside, my lack of confidence in WoodRiver stems from to two sets of forstner bits that would not cut AT ALL. Horrible product. I switched to Fisch Wavecutters and they are amazing (albeit 3 times the money). In fairness, I do have a WoodRiver round scraper that seems OK.
