I'm a fan of #3, but with the ESP32 family rather than Arduino series. Same reason: someone has probably written an Arduino library for whatever I'm looking to drive (most are trivially ported to the ESP core)

I wish I could knuckle down and figure out #1, or, how to get Python talking through one of those FTDI USB->GPIO/I2C/SPI/UART/kitchenSink chips in a way that works in between OS reformats.