After I get some sleep I'll benchmark the three approaches

You could certainly do that, but I believe you would be better off continuing with the method you find easiest, clearest, and most suitable. The difference in execution time between the various methods is likely (almost guaranteed) to be negligible, whereas using a method/module you find unintuitive will slow you down.
Your time is worth more than a few seconds of processor execution time.

Update: Minor text edit; title change

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