Hello, > would you be open to using another implementation of an ssh server? > If so, it would be a third approach:
Yes, it would be. It might help with the attack surface issue of current sshd. However, I would guess that most of the alternative to OpenSSH are using libssh, which also had some issues. I presumably would trust a stripped-down OpenSSH more than anything based on libssh, but I might be wrong.