I'm in a somewhat similar situation to you: I graduated with a Bachelors in Science and I have some programming experience.
I suspect I'm too early on my path to offer you any real advice, but I can tell you where I'm headed and maybe that will be helpful in some way.
More or less, I'm pretty much taking your "Option 1" with a twist. I'm starting a PhD program soon, which has the disadvantage of taking more time, but the advantage of having no (direct) cost. It's fully funded with a salary provided, as per usual for STEM PhD programs.
The research I'm doing is related to materials processing and predictive modelling of processing routes (using some mixture of ML, NLP, etc.).
Anyway, I think the main useful takeaway is that you can avoid the out of pocket cost if you look at PhD programs rather than masters programs. In principle, you can always leave a PhD program with a masters (though it's somewhat dishonest to apply with this intent).
