Best topology for active attenuator
As the comments say, it depends on what you want to do.  But I want to point out a dangerous thing about your second circuit: if you run with a gain of less than unity, the op-amp may oscillate.  

Many op-amps are specified as "unity-gain stable" but they will indeed oscillate if your gain is less than unity.  TL074 / 084 is an example.  

Other op-amps such as the NE5534 are stable only with gain greater than 5.  If you run a NE5534 with gain less than 5, it will oscillate.

There is a cure for this oscillation problem - you have to add noise gain to the circuit.  You do that simply by adding a resistor from the op-amp (-) input to ground such that the gain of that resistor and feedback resistor is at least unity.  Then you can have a larger input resistor (R2) for gain less than unity.

I ran into this exact problem almost 30 years ago and either EDN or Electronic Design did a good article on the problem some time after that.  By then, I had already figured out what the problem was and fixed it but the magazine article went into a lot of detail that I hadn't thought about.