The best advice anyone could give you,
forget everything you read there!
If an article about mining ends up with this conclusion:
Keep in mind, though, that Bitcoin mining is probably the trickiest of them all – since the coin is so popular, there are many miners around the world tuning into the few pools that there are and trying to snatch at least a small bit of Bitcoin. This might result in you waiting for countless hours until the first drops of Bitcoin start coming in.
These are simply the main methods – if you’d like, you could even forget about mining and jump into Bitcoin faucets – but that’s a whole different story for a whole different day.
It is pretty clear the author has no clue about mining!
An article wrote by somebody who has learned about mining from other crappy articles.
Back to your question:
Which of these mining techniques do you encourage an aspirational miner to adopt?
There is no simple answer to your question, there are cases and cases.
How much do you pay for electricity, where do you plan on keeping them, how much do you have available to invest, etc etc...
Oh, and "software" mining, that's a load of bs.