Reminder that weekend plans that changed my mind [v2]

Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately. For context, I am working with a pretty modest budget so high-end suggestions probably will not land.

Spent the last few weekends digging into this and the deeper I go the more questions I have. There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right.