How weekend plans that changed my mind [v1]

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. Been thinking about this for a while and curious what the community thinks.

I want to write something more comprehensive about this later but starting with a quick post to gather thoughts.