If you wanna do it in a flexible way that is very easy to use and essentially the future of ZK, use Powdr [1]. Just write your code in rust nostd and be done with it. It's a compiler, basically. Once you use it, you'll never go back to hand-massaging polynomials. It'd be like writing assembly. Sure, some can do it, and it can be fun, but why do it if there are compilers out there to do the heavy lifting for you? :)
You sound like you are routinely doing zero knowledge proofs. To me it sounds like a very niche thing. What kind of application area needs knowledge proofs on the regular? Finance?
How about verification speed? The article mentions that avoiding trusted setup would result is sliver verification speed. Could it also increase proof size?
[1] https://github.com/powdr-labs/powdr