Hot take: weekend plans — what would you do? [v5]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not. 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. 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. The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping. Mostly thinking out loud — feel free to push back hard.