If you are in NE I guess you still have over a month till go time? My advice would be to pick ONE climbing method and stick with it till you have your up/down dialed. Saddle hunting is great but it's so hipster-ish these days that it's easy to feel like you are missing out on the latest and greatest climbing method between one-sticking, SRT, DRT, and 17 other boutique methods that all get your butt up a tree. My opinion is most of these methods have advantages, but also clear disadvantages, and that none are a panacea and none are so clearly heads and shoulders above the others to warrant a strong recommendation above regular-old climbing sticks. With regular sticks, 98% of the time you can easily be up a tree and hunting without making any noise at all in 5min if you are dialed. Just like climbing, if you have a "system"--everything in its place, double-checks, etc so every time you unpack and go up and down a tree it's exactly the same process--you can get very efficient and remain quiet and not break a sweat. Use your scouting time now and actually pick trees, set up your rig to trim lanes, etc, and use that as your climbing practice to figure out where everything needs to go, etc. If you keep futzing with stuff and changing things up in-season before you really have your systems down, it's much harder to feel like you are moving efficiently and remain safe, especially in the dark/freezing cold. Once you have a system down you will find your own likes and dislikes and frustrations--that's the time to research ways to attack that particular frustration and then try something different, again with the off-season scouting being the best place to try that out.
As far as advantages/disadvantages of saddle vs other tree stand hunting, I think your situation sounds perfect to me--you said you like to still hunt, you have a background in climbing. I have a couple spots I hunt that lend themselves to hunting from the ground, or sometimes I am exploring and scouting as much as hunting, and intend to cover some ground, find sign, and may end up hunting from the ground, maybe from a stand, etc. These are exactly the places where I break out my lightest rig, so I can still-hunt or cover many miles totally unencumbered with stand, etc, even though I have a full "tree stand" setup on my back the whole time. Personally, after trying a couple of the "boutique" climbing methods and using one-sticking for a full season pretty regularly, I have come back to using sticks--the short length/double-step sticks from beast gear or novix, probably in combo with at least one aider on the bottom stick and a set of dyneema/amsteel (same thing for the most part) daisy chains to attach sticks to tree, probably being my vote for best initial way to get up a tree if you are gearing up for the first time. However, the situation I outlined here, when there's a >50% chance I wont even get into a tree and the size/weight is helpful to actively hunt while carrying the whole rig-- is the one place I still use my one-stick setup for the weight and packing size. I use a mystery ranch pop-up 18 pack, saddle platform and stick and rope go in the load shelf and all stays inside the silhouette of the pack, and everything together including my saddle harness, a pair of hand-shears, all my gear for the tree, etc weighs about 8lb, so very manageable. I have a set of 4 carbon sticks with aiders that I use most of the time, so if I use those my saddle rig is the same but the sticks go horizontally in the load shelf along with the platform, and the whole rig weighs about 11lb including the saddle harness and everything above. My smallest/lightest tree stand (novix helo) weighs about 5.5lb more than my platform, you can get a few lighter stands but the bulk while carrying and actively hunting while wearing it are the bigger issue sometimes--sounds like that's right up your alley from the way you described your hunting style.
If you are hunting one small area and the stand is for a specific tree or locations or just a couple of them, if it's legal then you might be better off with a fixed stand or three, simply for comfort. You can pull the bottom stick or two if needed to leave them in place and cut your carrying weight.
