When should I not be using perfect tenses in Spanish where I do in English?

When I was first in the process of learning Spanish, I mostly just learned to use perfect tenses in pretty much any context I would use it in English. To be honest, this has seemingly served me pretty well because I'm fairly conversational and no one has ever corrected my usage this way.

However, I have noticed that there are constructions where you have to do this in English and it appears you don't in Spanish. For example, I was talking to a woman who is native in Spanish and her English is better than my Spanish but she is still learning. Sometimes she would ask how to say certain subjunctive statements like "if I had known, I would have...", etc. These all seem to be perfect tense phrases that don't translate to perfect tenses in Spanish.

Also, seemingly simple sentences in English always default to perfect tenses in English whereas Spanish can just use a simple past. An obvious example is "debí" or "debía". This seemingly is only "I should have gone", which is a perfect tense in English. My instinct would be to phrase this in spanish as "debería haber ido" but apparently you can just say "debí ir"?

I guess what I'm looking for is a general overview to try to give me a bigger picture of how the present tenses correspond/function in English vs Spanish so I'm not just defaulting to exact translations and getting it wrong. Is there a rule of thumb for me?