It is a tricky question, and as you say, very personal.
If I'm brutally honest, modern adoption is rarely the first choice for many people for a reason- it is often less straightforward and less forgiving than a birth child (although not always), and you are constantly thinking and juggling some very complex and ever changing situations. It is wise to consider carefully!
Yes, there are more prospective adopters, but that's not a reason to not begin the process, particularly if you have an element of your life that might make you particularly good parents to a specific child. The bedrooms situation for one sounds very positive, although I will caution as someone who adopted two siblings at once, it is certainly a bold choice, and three traumatised children is a lot to manage off the bat unless you have a significant support plan in place. There are many ways families can grow over time, and it may well be you start out with one child and another opportunity presents itself later on. However, some children may well fare best with all the love and attention of their parents poured into them, rather than having to negotiate multiple familial relationships. They deserve a home too! It would be great to be able to offer a child a bedroom and a sensory room for example, or consider a home gym set up if you can't get childcare.
Its also worth thinking about your lifestyle too in terms of whether you would be in crisis or not and whether it would be manageable, and this can be really personal. For example, our jobs and life centre around the school terms, and we make a point to go away and visit family every single holiday because we get to relax and get built in adult attention and grand parent
/aunt and uncle/cousin babysitting, even just so that we can eat a meal without being the ones who have had to cook and load the dishwasher as well. It means that every 6 weeks or so, we can have not a complete break but a change of scenery and the chance to take a breather. At one set of parents they are one of many boisterous cousins, and at the other they are the sole focus of their grandparents, so there are opportunities for us to let the foot off the pedal for a bit. Do you have the family set up to accomodate and allow you these breaks ? It is important to work out where you will fill your cup from and where your support network will be, and although it might change, it can help stave off a crisis. For other people they might have an excellent level of mental fortitude that comes from another area of life.
That being said, a crisis looks different for everyone. On the surface, and according to our Insta, our life looks relatively idyllic. One SAHM, one doing well in her career, two kids who are always out and about... but the reality is that it takes everything I have to keep any semblance of a home life going, and it is a fight and a battle to get the kids to a place where we need to be when we need to be there. It is not relaxing, and we dip in an out of crisis from week to week depending on how much either of us have in the tank. Crisis for us usually looks like losing the battle with housework and spending lots of time out and about, driving the short distance to school because the kids are too impulsive and reckless to be safe walking and locking the cat away for her own safety. It sounds insignificant, but if you are used to relaxing and having a quiet clean and tidy environment , it's amazing what a toll an overturned bag of flour can have on your mental health. It's never just flour, it means not baking the cake you had planned, a change in schedule, an extra trip to the shops, more mess to clean, another apology to extract from a belligerent 4 year old... I mean, Our kids were never really painted as manageable or easy, but you get the idea- some days flour on the floor is no big deal. Some days it is the straw that breaks the camels back.
You do learn as you go. For example, weve learned that our children don't do well indoors, and can tolerate a maximum of 2 hours in the house without stuff kicking off. One of the biggest things we have had to cope with is the continual movement and lack of relaxation unless they are asleep. I look in wonder at people who have PJ days and tell me that they didn't do much on the holiday and watched loads of TV, because the idea of a chilled out day that deviates from our routine sounds like bliss. We have a very specific order and time frame that currently cannot be moved from or else the kids think life is falling apart as they know it. So think no lie ins, shower and dressed in the same order at the same time, same breakfast (we've recently been able to introduce pancakes on a saturday) etc. My parents think we overschedule the children for days out during the holidays but they literally cannot cope with being in our house and trash the place unless they are physically exhausted. Not always intentionally, but they are high energy, active and curious with no off switch and a level of defiance that descends into dangerous behaviour unless managed carefully. That being said, they are bloody lovely, hilarious kids with a lot to give and so much love in their hearts that it's impossible to imagine our life without them.
It does get to a point in any fertility journey where a decision has to be made, so i understand that. The thing is, you will always have to reckon with the what if, and at some pijbt you need to choose your hard. Sometimes its helpful to have someone else say some of the harder thoughts so you know you are not alone. If adoption is the route, on your darkest days, you will probably wonder what if we had just kept going, surely it would have been successful and we would have had a bio child eventually and skipped out on some of the challenges we face. If you keep going and are successful in getting pregnant, you may feel guilt about it, or resent how long it took, or be cross with the child later on if they have difficulties because it took so long and so much effort to concieve them. If you keep trying and it doesn't work out, it could feel like time wasted with any adoption process and like you have possibly missed out on a child destined for you. These are all hard and and big feelings, and often unresolved- therapy can help clarify decisions and the intentions behind it, but to some extent the road not travelled may always haunt you. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had made different choices at different points of our journey. We didn't, so I don't dwell, but it is only human to think about it.
The thing I found hardest was letting go of when deciding to go for adoption was what i imagined the outcome to be. It was often too painful to think about a child at the end of it, in case it all fell through. When we did, the child was an abstract concept. With adoption, at first you lose the idea that you are able to shape and create the influences in a childs life, because they are often presented to you as a complete person that you need to accomodate in their entirety, as though their experiences are the sum total of what they are, as though they won't fit and adapt to you. In many ways this is true. Adopted kids often need you to make space for them in a way birth children dont because they grow around you. Its hard to describe how this will affect you, because it will be small things, not the big ones that matter. When we were going through the process, we tried to imagine the type of kid we would be paired with so we cpuld try to predict whether we could cope with those challenges. I don't think that we did imagine our two, because in the same way you probably didn't imagine your life partner doing or saying the things they do, or being in the situation you are, or having the good times and in jokes one does in an intimate relationship, you forget that there could be any other option, and you can't even begin to imagine that the quirks they have and how you will like them (or hate them) because you never thought about it.For example, we always wanted to travel with our kids. With birth kids, we would probably have done it immediately, they would have been used to flying and car journeys and it would have been normal for our family. With adopted kids, we didn't necessarily realise the level of complexity it would entail, but also the random joys that it would bring. Ok, so we need to do social stories about airports, and spend an inordinate amount of money on McDonalds because it is the same wherever you go, and have googled "how to stop a child removing his seat belt at 70mph on a motorway because he is cross you wont give him mint imperials you don't have, no really, why is it illegal to Superglue a seat belt harness together" etc, but then again, they also get obsessed by singing it's a long way to tipperary with so many wrong lyrics it's adorable, look at you like you are incredible for taking them to a museum with buses and make a genuine, unprompted apology for slamming their tablet so hard in their brothers face they gave him a nosebleed. It isn't what we imagined.... and yet it is more.
Adoption is absolutely a lottery, but then again, so is life, so is dating, so is work, etc. You might find The One. You might also find someone who will give you a good foot rub but picks his nose, and you decide you can live with that. Few people are in jobs or careers that are absolutely perfect, more people go to work to earn money to do what they love. What is manageable for one is not for another. I know for sure our two couldn't have been parented by many other families, because their behaviour would preclude it, but somehow we are rubbing along one way or another, trying our best amd making it through to another day. Life is continuing, it is vastly different to how we imagined, but it continues and brings both joy and despair in equal measures. Its also worth remembering that not all lottery winners are happy and not all poor people are sad! Gambles may pay-off in many different ways. I bought a euro millions ticket the other day not because I have much hope for winning but because my grandma and I always played the lottery together, I wanted a reason to walk to the shop and I like the idea that I have a tiny sliver of potential hope in my purse u til Wednesday. Those small joys are important too, even if I don't win.
Unfortunately there is no easy answer, and I don't envy your position. TTC is an emotional journey, and there may not be a "right" answer or time, but rather a "good enough" or "ok for us" time to stop.