SEO vs Subdomains, Addons, Primary Domains

Greetings, would appreciate some help from experienced members. I've been out of touch with SEO for some time and a lot has changed - I'm trying to go as cheap as possible but don't want to sacrafice not having my sites found by search engines. I may even picked up some poor information searching the net!

Lets say I want to set up 50 one product sites (downloadable) or 50 affiliate sites or blogs. I use BlueHost with a single cpanel right now, unlmited subdomains, unlimited addons.

I placed below four choices in order of preference and SEO problems I've read about, can I get some help as to which way is the best:

1) Of course subdomains (minisite.mydomain/index.html) would be the clean and cheap method - but I've read so many bad things about using this practice with each site selling a different product and lots of controversy over creating .htaccess files for the main domain and subdomains; also from what I've read linking from the subdomains to each other is not liked by search engines.

2) Then there are separate folders (mydomain/minisite/index.html) from the main domain with same problems as subdomains (see 1).

3) $ Next comes Addon Domains from the same cpanel with the same problems if not more as subdomains (see 1). An addon creates a subdomain which shows up as 2 identical sites unless you redirect the subdomain through an .htaccess file.

4) $$ Then I thought a hosting reseller account using separate cpanels and domains would solve all the search engine problems until I read that as shared hosting all domains would have the same IP which would hurt search results.

I would just like to get some opinions, messing around with code in .htaccess files can be tricky and kill any chance of being picked up by Google. I've tried an addon on BlueHost and could never get any good results, in fact it was so bad that doing a Google search with just the addon-domain name, no .com, came up without finding the addon domain. Yet a search for the main domain turns up as number one, page one, on Google as it should.

Thank you for any suggestions and opinions,
BobK