At the engineering/product meeting with @Lydia_Pintscher @thiemowmde @WMDE-leszek @Ladsgroup @aude @hoo and me, it was decided to go with the multi-variant approach. @Denny had previously said on the mailing list that he now also favors this approach. Arguments:

• the multi-variant approach is more in line with the Lemon model
• the multi-variant approach better forward-compatibility (no breaking change for consumers when going to a single-lemma model).
• the multi-variant model is more expressive, and thereby leads to more concise and easier to manage instance data.
• the logic needed to select a variant based on user preferences already exists for Item labels.