Do not even consider that hybrid pool. I would love to hear from some of the hybrid pool builders as to how you are supposed to fix them when they start to fail down the road. I have seen more than a dozen of this style of pool get filled in since there is essentially no recourse for shifting deck or walls, which can happen as they age. They start losing water and the only fix is to remove and replace the pool. Your gunite pool quotes are certainly a better option than the hybrid.

Which pool builder do you prefer? (either based on intuition, reviews, previous work). A great pool builder can build any pool you want and work with you to make smart $ choices. You may want to rank a list of pool features. It sounds like you have not finalized the desired design yet. Regarding budget, no matter how hard we tried, along the way we made decisions to upgrade materials or change the design (through "change orders"). So the initial contract price for the pool was definitely not what the final expenses were and we went way overbudget! So we're staycationing and eating beans! The most overlooked feature is the decking. There are tons of options with different costs of this area also. I'm a little nervous about builder 1 after reading SwimmingPoolSteve's comment. Could you work with builder 2 to bring down the costs in other ways? Good luck!