Since the ultimate goal is PoS, why favor Option 1 over Option 3?
I vote Option 3, unless for some reason people think Option 1 would lead to a larger price rise.
Option 1 or 1B would produce a couple million fewer coins into circulation, so the price might rise a bit faster and higher. But I don't think it would be a big difference. We might have 33 million coins in circulation when we switch to PoS instead of 35 million, something like that. About 5-10% fewer coins.
Option 3 might give us a somewhat better chance of persuading pools to switch to the fork. But I don't know enough about how pools operate to have an informed opinion about those prospects. Anyone want to weigh in that?
Instead of persuading pools, why don't we setup our own Solarcoin pool with 0 pool fee ? It cant be so hard. If there someone experienced about pool setup, I can provide a server on azure.