I ended up going the Bitaxe route. It was really easy to set up and now I'm in the mining game.
I'm glad I started small, because even this little miner is pretty loud.
After a little research, I decided to join the OCEAN pool, because they allow custom block templates. I don't have the expertise to do that yet, but it seems important for decentralization to allow it. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the best pools.
Is it worthwhile to set up lightning payments? It sounded like a bit of a pain to do so. I'm assuming all the payouts are part of one transaction, since my share is much less than a transaction fee.