I have done 3 and 4, and I definitely prefer the air gradient, it is a nice sleek little box that is flashable with esphome making it tie directly into HASS. Will be getting more of them in the near future.

Python is pretty easy to pickup and super popular so there are tons of guides and libraries to help get the job done. It does have a library called PyGame but honestly it is not super powerful, however there is a FOSS engine called Godot that uses what they call gdscript, which is very similar to Python.