The "right" way to handle multiple devices, accounts and the cloud?

Question

Perhaps a bit premature, but I figure it's never too early to start planning. 
Here's our current setup - I currently have four iDevices in the faily (three iPhones and one iPod Touch.  All are syncing to the same Mac Mini, albeit with different logins (and different iTunes store ids).  All four of these are kept in sync via Home Sharing so we have access to the music/apps/etc acquired by the others.
Enter the iCloud - how does this fit in?  What's the *right* way to do this? 
I can see two options:
1)     Continue to utilize four iTunes store ids, sync them via Home Sharing and add four iClouds
     Advantages
          totally independent devices, users, etc.
     Disadvantages
          must pay for four "iTunes Match" services to access non-iTunes music on each of the four devices
          will iTunes-purchased music automaticaly sync to iCloud if it is shared via Home Sharing (or only by the original purchaser)?
2)     Use one iTunes Store id for all iDevices
     Advantages
          single point of acquisition and distribution for all devices
     Disadvantages
          need to find a way to merge IDs (is this even possible?)
Are there other advantages/disadvantages to these options?  Are there other options?  What's the easiest to set up and support?  Any other thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your input.

Answer 1

Well it seems like the first thing you should do is consolidate your iTunes libraries so that you don't have 4 copies of everything, one for each user logged in to your Mac Mini. How you do that is consolidate all 4 iTunes folders to one folder located in the /Users/Shared/ folder and update each of your iTunes to point to that folder accordingly. That way you have one iTunes library, only one copy of your media, but accessible from multiple users.
One caveat is that if somebody is logged on and has iTunes open, you can't fast switch to another user and open iTunes. Apple made it so that only one user and one instance of iTunes can open a iTunes library at a time.
For your iTunes match situation, it does sound like you would be much better off sharing a single Apple ID with one iTunes Match. For consolidating, make sure you have everything everybody has shared via Home Sharing to the main account you'd like to move over to, and then simply go to each device Settings, Store, and the sign out of the original Apple ID and logon using the shared main Apple ID. I just looked at it and the automatic downloading is already live in iOS! You can specify if you want to do music, apps, and books separately in case you may want to automatically download music but not apps or books.