So I went into a bike shop today and swapped my cassette and chain from 10 spd to 9 with bigger gears for hills. Definitely an improvement over the 11-32 cogset I was running before.

I want to replace my small and middle chainrings too but they are Sugino and I couldn't understand the xplanation as to why but the gist of it was that they were only willing to swap out the entire crankset. That doesn't seem reasonable to me at all but this is the second time in my life I've had a shop refuse to swap chainrings. I think the first time was in France and I don't recall why they said it couldn't be done either. But yeah, I'd really like to avoid buying a whole new crankset just to get more mountain appropriate chainrings...

So two questions:

Is the swap easy to do myself and can it be done without purchasing a bunch of specialized tools (I am nomadic) and can I put chainrings from other brands onto Sugino cranks?

I would have thought all that matters is getting the desired number of teeth and appropriately placed bolt holes.