I too am an older dude who was faced with the same decsions. I went through a local school. I was able to finance my training. I stayed close to home because I have a family. If I had no family obligations, I would have gone to all atp and just cranked through all of the ratings up through all the cfi ratings and might have done the jet transition. Take a good look at schools at which you can bang out all the ratings, then teach for a year. I really think that teaching is where you will truly learn.
You need to crank this out asap.
good luck,
snowpilot