The "right way" all depends on what you are trying to achieve.
But, FWIW, IMHO nothing involving Windows XP SP2 can really be considered "the right way". Although it is a lot less wrong than 9.1D
If the users do not need developer licenses then you probably ought not to be deploying them (among other things it is rather expensive).
You could just:
1) 9.1D: proutil dbName -C truncate bi
2) 10.2B proutil dbName -C conv910
and that would get you converted.
I suppose that starting from a .df file and loading data is, in some sense, more "pure" but there is little point in doing that unless you also implement type 2 storage areas (which you definitely should do -- but perhaps as phase 2 of your conversion...)