Using pySAM as an alternative to PLEXOS

Dear SAM community,

I'd like to solicit general experience of using different tools, specifically to model a mixed portfolio of renewable plants to meet a mixed load. My organisation would like to model how a portfolio of different RE plants across a country can meet a fixed load across hourly periods. This modelling would help optimise the best mix of locations, technologies and storage for cost and reliability. We are considering two different tools for this. One is PLEXOS; a commerical software used by energy system planners (and NREL) normally as a economic dispatch model. I understand that it has the required capabilities, but it would require an investment in money (for the licenses) and time, to learn how to use it. It's also computationally quite demanding and can take a long time to run. I feel that the tool may be too complicated for our needs.

The other option would be to use pySAM and some open source solvers. At a high level, I'd approach it like this:

1) Choose the locations of the wind and solar plants I'd like to model
2) Get a standard generation profile for a fixed capacity for each of the sites using SAM plus weather files
3) Combine those generation profiles using Python
4) Use pySAM again to model a battery, if there's a discharge algorithim that maximises reliability
5) Flex the total capacities, allocation of capacities across sites, mix of technologies, amount fo storage, etc using a solver. 
Potentially steps 3 - 5 can just be done by the python package OEMOF-solph.

The benefits of this approach would be that its free and accessible. It could be set up to be usable by people even without python skills. It should be fast to run. The use of SAM means that the generation could be modelled to high accuracy. The downsides would be that potentially the storage behaviour wouldn't be as accurate, if just modelled simply by OEMOF-solph. And maybe the optimisation tools aren't as extensive as PLEXOS. And that there may be an organisation preference to model the plants in a commercial tool like PLEXOS before making the final investment decision, so we'd need to use it eventually anyway.

Has anyone had this challenge before, and managed to solve it using pySAM? Or had relative experience of SAM vs PLEXOS? Is there another portfolio optimisation programme which you'd recommend that I consider?

Thanks,
Henry