Practically speaking, there's really only 2 choices of Cryptonight variants for DERO: Cryptonight Heavy or Cryptonight v7 (ie - what Monero went with). Anything else - unless an existing algo - will all but guarantee the coin is abandoned because there won't be any mining software for it.

I currently use xmr-stak because it performs the best, but I agree it is difficult to optimize. Also note that Heavy hashes slower, but everyone will be affected by this slowdown the same in percentage terms so once difficulty adjusts for the lower total network hashrate earnings should be very similar to before the ASIC invasion.

Theoretically, anyway!