I should have proofread what I typed before posting it but that is really semantics. They are both vehicles for trading the same thing so it is irrelevant. What you clearly are misinformed on is the practical side of this.

As a professional trader who routinely trades these vehicles side by side I could easily prove through hundreds of actual trades made the relative lack of liquidity and poor fills in the SPY vs the futures. The minimum tick value might be one thing but where the fills actually occur is quite another. I can easily move a 50 lot in the futures without moving the spread at all but no way could you ever trade an equivalent position in the Spiders with the same effect. There was a year where I traded the same trades exactly entered at the market with these two different vehicles at the same time, and there was an over 20% difference in the gain at the end of the year, case closed. Trust me from someone who has done this for 25 years, SPY’s are much less liquid than the futures, especially now in this environment.

Options are the most illiquid choice available, and also have the time value decay problem, but I suppose better than doing nothing at all.