[mr48chev]

A dropped axle is almost entirely an unbolt and bolt back on affair with little or no fabricating and it doesn't require a high degree of mechanical skill. You do either have to take your axle off and send it in and wait until it comes back or pay a core charge and either eat the core charge and keep your old axle or send the old axle back to get the core charge back. UPS fees probably are more than the Core fee on some axles though.
The dropped axle is also going to give you the least amount of down time and the axle swap and brake swap could be done at different times even though it would require a bit of backtracking if you decided to divide the costs between a few paydays. You could put it back together with the drum brakes and then pull them off later to install the disk setup.

I didn't hunt your old posts so I don't know if you have an AD or Task Force truck but personally I'll never subframe another AD truck as there is a whole lot of sheet metal work (trimming) involved to get the nose to fit the subframe.

one option that doesn't require a lot of fabricating or down time would be a bolt on MII style crossmeber. They have them for AD trucks but I'm not sure about task force. All you need for that is a good 1/2 inch drill, a hand full of wrenches and hopefully a good helper but a guy can do it himself with no help pretty easily.