It does help, thank-you very much. Because there is no "right" choice, it means there is no "wrong" answer. That in and of itself is signal. I can pick a path optimizing for other criteria.
I did some searching based on your input, to check the resources out there for LN. Here are my notes so far (maybe they will help somebody else).
Lightning Community
TIL there is a community hub for building on LN with a Guide. And they have a javascript and python sections.
I found this which has a repo for making the widget.
Next.js
I'm tempted to explore using this, just because the stacker.news repo exists and I can reason about the app's architecture & example. Plus, maybe it might become easier for me to contribute.
Lightning Community
Awesome Lightning
Django
Vue.js
Next.js