Standard ways to create xml scenes for research purposes
(In case someone encounters similar issue)

I end-up in Way 1, and it seems the standard way in academia.

Once I am familar with Blender, the scene creation becomes less challenging; still, it takes some time to create a simple scene. Fortunately for academic papers the number of scenes are a few (&lt; 10).

Unfortunately the old Mitsuba parser does not work for the latest Blender version. So I wrote a custom 2.8x Blender add-on for Mitsuba, as well as creating new, custom material nodes for my own renderer.