I'd be curious to see if you've tried git-annex, I use it instead of git-lfs when I need to manage big binary blobs. It does the same trick with a "check out" being a mere symlink.
I haven't used it, no. Around the time Git LFS was released, my read from the community was that Git LFS was favored to supersede git-annex, so I focused my time investigating Git LFS. Given that git-annex is still alive and well, I may have discounted it too quickly :) Maybe I'll revisit it in the future. Thanks for sharing!
Neither is favored, git-annex solves problems that git LFS doesn't even try to address (distributed big files), at the cost of extra complexity.
Git LFS is intended more for a centralized "big repo" workflow, git annex's canonical usage is as a personal distributed backup system, but both can stretch into other domains.
In this case git-annex seems to have a feature that git LFS doesn't have that would be useful to you.
