I second Dave's suggestion.
With regards to the consumers round-robining between topics, they usually
round-robin in batches. So you'll probably see a consumer work on a large
batch of records from TopicA before moving on to TopicB. Depending on the
behavior of the producers this might appear the
I would go with #1:
1. It will be easier to add new "batch producers" since you won't need to worry
about re-partitioning
2. You have more control over the parallelism since you can have different
numbers of partitions for each topic
3. You can easily split out your consumer into N consumers if
