Honestly if you do BLW you get there pretty quickly - it takes anything from 2-6 weeks for them to go from barely grasping things/chasing it around the highchair to fairly competently picking up anything at all and giving it a good old go, so you can really start with "proper" food right from the start although I know exactly what you mean as we are still in this stage with Alex, I am kind of eyeing up foods in terms of would he actually be able to have the dexterity to handle this, rather than whether or not he'd like it or it's suitable for him. We went out today for our anniversary to this fusion Japanese/Chinese buffet place (it's not a shared buffet, it's more like tapas, you order to the table) and most things were either cut much too small or covered in sauce, but DH did feed him a bit of sticky sushi rice from a cucumber roll, which he absolutely LOVED :o Then at the end he ordered a mixed fruit bowl thinking Alex could have a bit of fruit, but it wasn't accessible to him at all so I ended up eating it. But I remember particularly with DS1, who I did totally BLW with, that I was giving him anything and everything. The stage at the start where you look at a whole English breakfast and think er..... yeah alright you can have a corner of toast, or the only thing that they can have out of a meal is a bit of cucumber off the garnish - that is very very short lived.
In terms of purees, well the German system is so incredibly nicely laid out that I will just share that with translation, because I think it's lovely.
The yellow part is milk feeds. Then at anywhere from 4-5 months you start with a mixed up vegetable-potato-meat puree (red section) once per day at lunchtime or dinnertime. One month after starting this, you add the big purple layer which is a milk-cereal puree (e.g. baby porridge, baby rice, etc) as your second meal at lunchtime or breakfast time. One month after starting this, you fill in the last mealtime with a cereal-fruit puree.
Then the dotted line shows the transition between purees to actual meals. So at about 6-7 months you would transition from a meat/veg puree to your family main/hot meal, mashed up less and less until they are eating it normally by about age 1. At about 7-8 months you would transition from the porridge (blue) to what German children generally eat as an evening meal/breakfast which is bread with cheese, ham, salami and cut up vegetables and at 8-9 months you'd drop the last puree meal (green) and add in 2x snacks. Then when the baby seems ready at some point between 9-12 months you'd add in breakfast or that last evening meal. So everything is happening rather slowly in a rough timescale from 4-12 months with the pure milk phase being 0-4 months, the puree phase being 6-8 months and the normal food phase starting at around 9+ months. It's a bit too rigid for me with all the different food groups laid out like that but in a way I just think it's so nice and neat and a great way of thinking about things!
Oh god I'm waffling on again. But the other thing I'd say is just if you're having spaghetti bolognese or whatever - you can just stick that in a bowl, cut the spaghetti a few times and spoon feed it right from 6 months. If you're still on totally smooth purees then you might want to blend it up first, or just add a bit of the sauce to some baby rice or something, but you'll find over time they can cope with more and more texture, so you go from taking some ingredients of your dinner out and making that into a puree, to making a puree/mash of little pieces of all (or most) of a dinner with a bit of milk added to thin it down, to roughly mashing a dinner, to offering a dinner that is cut into tiny pieces, then cut into slightly bigger pieces, until you're barely moderating it at all.
Or BLW style spaghetti bolognese, make it with twisty pasta (easier to grip), put some in front of him and let him eat it off his hands. You can do that from 6 months. I always think if you're doing BLW you may as well do it before 6 months but if you're wanting to stick to NHS guidelines, it's 6 months for meat and wheat.
It's easier if you're already in the habit of cooking for yourself/partner/other DC. If you're not really and tend to eat a lot of convenience foods then it can be trickier to work out how it all fits in but it all comes together in the end. I'm so bad for relying on that kind of thing TBH. I always think the baby is going to miraculously convert me into a housewife that whips up dinners and I don't think that will ever happen!