Your 1. seems good enough as a starter, yeah. I’ll probably tell my users to ditch the app altogether otoh, so I’m looking forward to the Pi as a long-term solution

Though, what kind of non-tech nightmares are you referring to? I’d think that if being done properly and with autodiscovery enabled, it would be as seamless as “connect to printer/scanner X on the network” which is the Pi itself. But I probably haven’t understood enough