In my experience with swing trading I find options work well when fading the market, and trading the underlying if trading breakouts/in direction of the trend.
Contact your broker and ask them to explain the term 'Pattern Day Trader' and how they handle that. You may be surprised...
keep in mind that futures are a very leveraged product. on a good note, PDT rules don't apply to the futures market. on a bad note, they apply to SEC markets, and you may have some issues since your account is under 25k. however, with index options, you can leg into some fairly tight spreads if you don't have any daytrades available to you. big vol moves may hurt you if you choose options to fade the market. so pay attention to what the vols are doing.
tonyc - What is your average holding period likely to be? Unless it's a really long period, and there is something about your strategy that also predicts upcoming volatility, then trading futures sounds better by a wide margin due to transactions costs. But why not just trade the ETFs themselves? That actually sounds best. kps