cTrader Automat vs OpenAPI

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, so I'll try to introduce myself first: I'm a Net / Sys / Dev Admin & Ops with a formal education in programming that for the past year of so has been tinkering with MQL5 / MT5 trading robots (Expert Advisors as they are oficially called). Although I briefly enjoyed going back to the C/C++ days when writing the EAs I soon became frustrated with the lack of reliable external libraries (external DLL's are not really my cup of tea) and the fact that I need to keep a Windows machine (be it phyisical or virtual, it's still yet another thing to take care of) for the terminal.

I've discovered cTrader the last couple of weeks and reading throught the documentation I've discovered that I can either:

1. use cTrader Automate and write something in C# (lightyears ahead of MT5) OR
2. implement OpenAPI with ProtoBuf in my favourite language (python and Go are my candidates here)

And now I turn to the cTrader community for advice: what would be the best approach going forward? cTrader Automate or OpenAPI? Are there any obvious PROs and CONS to each?

Thx!