As an "EFL" speaker, yours is clearer, more grammatical. If I'd written this, I'd probably have changed the "opting instead" to "when they opted", but yours uses two shorter sentences, which is better style in English.

Having seen native French speakers producing "one sentence covers an entire page" text when studying ESL, I've tried to keep my bad habits under control myself. Can be a bit too easy to produce a runaway sentence sometimes, when you've a lot of thoughts to get on the page.