How to improve a dining room table

When two people combine households, there is a lot of furniture in the mix. Luckily, most of the pieces I care about E also likes, and most of the pieces he wants to keep I like.
However, there is the rather large matter of his rather large dining room table and chairs which he loves and I think are clunky, generic, and masculine.
It's a huge dark wood oval table and dark wood chairs with those X backs like this but thicker:

So what to do? We don't want to blow a lot of money on a new dining set, so we are planning on making his table work for us.

One thing that I think will help is removing a leaf to make it less overwhelmingly large.

We could refinish it, but who has a sander and stripper and stain and time to do all those coats?
There are some makeovers online that might be worth a try:

Paint the bottom and chairs off-white for a lighter, shabby chic look.

Paint the whole thing slate gray and put a design on top for a modern look.

Paint the table black and the chairs white for a fresh and stark look.

Paint the table black and stencil letters to a cheesy quote to make everyone vomit no matter how good the dinner you made is.

These painted stripes are fun, and you could customize with whatever colors match your furniture.

We could paint with chalkboard paint. Instead of these crappy kid designs, though, we could do grocery lists, or place cards, or chalk outlines of where the place settings go. This is my favorite idea so far.

Paint and lacquer for an ultra-modern feel.

We could also do a coordinating solid color like moss green or burgundy.

Any opinions on which one of these options (or none) would be the best?