Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Most welcome Tom. Happy to assist. P.

Hey Tom, Can you confirm that there has been no penalty on your blog domain? If not, you should be careful because penalties are known to hop 301s and JohnMu recently revealed that penalties will follow content without a 301. That said I would prioritize what you redirect based on what has links and shares. There's no reason to set up redirects for page that no one is visiting or linking to. Go with your first option, but 410 them to get them out of the index faster. -Mike