How to create DFA from regular expression without using NFA?

Objective is to create DFA from a regular expression and using "Regular exp>NFA>DFA conversion" is not an option. How should one go about doing that?

I asked this question to our professor but he told me that we can use intuition and kindly refused to provide any explaination. So I wanted to ask you.

"Regular exp>NFA>DFA conversion" is not an option because such conversation takes a lot of time to convert a rather complex regular expression. For example, for a certain regex "regex>NFA>DFA" takes 1 hour for a human being. I need to convert regex to DFA in less than 30 minutes.