What are the pros and cons of these two options?
Other than different complexities of processing steps, the big difference between the two approaches (simple regression or deconvolution with -stim_nptr plus regression) is whether you want to model the impulse response functions of your stimuli. The choice would be mainly based on whether you trust any default hrf's in waver.
If you want to use waver to generate regressors for 3deDeconvolve, you can either set option -tstim with an input of those time moments when stimulus occured, or use option -input of 0's and 1's at each 0.5 seconds. As far as I know there is no such sampling program in AFNI to sample the output at different rates, but it is easy to do so in Matlab, or to write a shell script file for such a purpose.
Gang