Reminder that unpopular opinions I keep coming back to

I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right. I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not. I want to write something more comprehensive about this later but starting with a quick post to gather thoughts. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately.

Spent the last few weekends digging into this and the deeper I go the more questions I have. For context, I am working with a pretty modest budget so high-end suggestions probably will not land. There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019.