Rei, (and Percy, since I've read most of the posts here.)
Here's how I deal with the young earth ideas in Genesis.
God says that He created the heavens and the earth, but He doesn't say, explicitly, when (vs 1). When asked by Kabbalists, and the fundamentalists I have heard of who took the trouble, the answer received was, "a very long time ago." Some Kabbalists even got an estimate approximating that of the cosmologists.
But, as the story unfolds, the earth was laid waste and destroyed. Now, this is often translated "formless and void," but the Hebrew words used here are translated elsewhere as "laid waste and destroyed." That this could happen at this point in Genesis is later confirmed by the pre-existing presence of a destroyer, Satan, who shows up without being "created" (except as part of the heavens and the earth in verse 1) in Chap. 3. Then, in six days, about 6000 years ago, God restored the creation that had been destroyed.
The beauty of evolutionary theory is that it takes a long time, and describes a process of the production of biological and physical diversity. But that process could be either a creation or an evolution. Selection could be either natural or artificial. Genetic change could be either random mutation or genetic engineering. Data that indicate either selection or genetic change support both theories. If creation is true, we learn something about the way God, the Creator, works, about His nature, what we can expect from Him, even from the theory of evolution. It's like Newton's laws of force and motion. Not exactly true, but useful for many practical purposes.
That the restored creation retains the agedness of the original is thus a restatement of your option 1
1) God is a prankster, and deliberately set up the universe to look old as a trick to us.
into, "God deliberately set up the universe in its orginal old age, because that's the way it was when it was destroyed, the way He wanted it to be. He wanted us to know how He went about creating things, so that when we (His image) would create things, and would choose to do so in a Godly fashion, we would know how that was." We have the six day restoration story, so that when we found something that was laid waste and destroyed by evil (either our creation, or His), and wanted it restored, we could know that a "miraculous" fast restoration was always possible.
This view of creation, when dealt with scientifically, I call evolition, to contrast with evolution. Giving the two theories these similar names seems to defuse in my mind the idea that the theories are of different natures and cannot be studied using strong inference. In strong inference, one takes two competing explanations, and deduces opposing predictions from the two. Then, the predictions are tested, and the theory whose predictions are confirmed gains in plausibility compared to the theory whose predictions are not. In this case, we might (!) predict from the theory of creation, from evolition, that those who "forget God" as is done with most evolutionary thinking will be artificially selected against by the artificially selecting Creator, still busy at work shaping His creation. That is, evolutionists ought to have a lower fitness, less reproducing offspring, than those believing in a Creator. From the theory of evolution, we (might, again) get the opposite prediction. That is, if a Creator can be safely forgotten, not being relevant to fitness, etc, then those who waste time on the idea, or are deluded or deceived (i.e. creation believers), being less aware of the truth about forces that determine fitness, would have fewer reproducing offspring. This assumes of course that intelligence "evolved" through natural selection, being a trait that produced clearer, more accurate perceptions and expectations of "selection pressures."
In this simple test, the human group with the largest known fitness, Mennonites and Amish, being creation believers, confirm the truth of the evolition theory. Except for Robert Trivers, a unique evolutionary biologist who explicitly took his theory to heart and went out to have a large biological fitness, evolutionists are probably lower than the general population in reproductive success.
Don't want to make too much out of this test, of course. Just presented as an example of how one scientist is going about seeing which theory is most plausible.