I'd agree with your thoughts for your situation of using room correction and subs. In my case, I'm too old and too far behind on using those modalities, and have too little room for subs, so I tend to want big floor standers. And I'm aware of no local fellow audio guys who could help bring me up to speed on such matters, or even help me set up the programs.I am an amateur. I am not an expert.
My wife really likes the look of Persona 3f. She finds the color and styling appealing, and I find the sound quality excellent (at least, good enough for me), so that's why I got them. It should go without saying that tastes differ, but I don't think it can be said that Persona styling appeals particularly to one gender or another, or has a low or high WAF. For myself, I find it very difficult to accurately judge the quality of the finish on any product going only by an internet photograph. Things can look better or worse in real life, so if you haven't seen something in person, you probably don't really know exactly what that something looks like.
One question I have, considering 3F vs 5F, 7F, 9F. it seems to me the only differences between all of these is the woofers. All these models use the same tweeter and mid driver, right? So, only the woofers, and therefore the cabinets, differ. Of course, the 9F also has room correction and powered woofer built into the cabinet, which is admittedly a very big difference by itself. So, my thoughts are to have the 3f (which I bought used), add quality PC based room correction and 2 (or more) powered subwoofers of adequate quality, and hope to get as good or perhaps better overall system performance than one could get getting even the 9F's, for a lot less $$. In other words, you're going to buy those subs anyway, so why spend the extra money on the 5, 7, or 9F?
I am an amateur. I am not an expert.
As to the Persona floor standers, I see that the low frequency specs of the 5F are barely lower than the 3F. You have to get to the 7F to get markedly deeper bass extension, and I would consequently want to get into the 7F if I were to go with Persona. But then you are talking astronomical amounts of money. It seems like I could get as good, or better, low frequency performance with a nice used set of Revel F208 for ~$3,500.