I may be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here... (you may already be aware of all of this but here are some tips anyhow)
(I will be releasing a tutorials section on my personal website soon that should give step by step techniques on how to master roto, paint, patch and simple colour correction so keep an eye out for the launch of that)
Yes definitely learn to use the quickpaint node.
warning: a quickpaint node with lots of brush strokes will really slow down shake.
familiarise yourself with using different brush strengths, opacities and definitely learn to use the reveal and clone tools within the quickpaint node.
I do this sort of work professionally in the film industry and there a variety of techniques you can use depending on the shot content and the footage motion.
Sometimes pure paint work is needed where you will be painting frame by frame throughout the sequence... (this can result in boiling of the painted areas of the image) These can often be reduced using a technique called roll-mixing where you use a low opacity of the previous frame to lightly coat your later paint strokes throughout the sequence then use the frame +1 (your later frame) to lightly coat your paint strokes moving backwards through the time line.
Often you can obtain fantastic results using a combination of paintwork and patching methods. this will involve probably learning how to use the stabilize node and also learning how to align footage using a combination of the mix,invert and move2d nodes so that you can see footage on top of each other.
I often these days do all pure paint shots in either Commotion or curious GFX if i can get hold of a license at my current company.
If you cant find any footage of wire removals to learn with, try getting some interesting footage that has elements possibly in the background that move and remove them instead.
eg. a teacher at a blackboard, remove the chalk or the letters that she writes.