We were basically in the same boat, needed to start a project with a tight deadline for a large customer with executive level stakeholders. In the end, we chose Designer/Discovery. Lessons learned:
I wouldn't suggest investing time in Lumira Discovery. I've had several issues with this software and the response from support is to move to SAC as they are no longer making any changes to the discovery client. Whereas SAC, their release schedule is frequent and you can at least submit ideas on the influence site for this product. Discovery is the route we took for one of our clients only due to tight deadlines. Parallel to this we also ran a POC in SAC, and found that SAC capabilities still weren't up to meet the functionality we were using in Designer. SAC still continues to be a non-viable solution for us at this time (for replacement of the Discovery client).
(As a side note, we're actually contemplating on going back to Xcelsius as the customer liked the look and feel and performance of those dashboards much better than in Discovery.)
If your customer has a project with immediate needs and a deadline and stringent requirements, probably best to go with Designer. They must also understand that any new functionality they will need that doesn't exist will not be able to be accomplished as there's no more investments here.
If they're willing to negotiate on some of the requirements knowing that improvements will be coming along the way (with a refrequent painless release cycle), then I would encourage you to push them to SAC and make due with what you can and actively participate in the influence site.
There was also supposed to be a hybrid license model coming out in H2 2018. If this was already available, this may make your decision a lot easier as well, but I haven't heard anything on this since this spring.
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