Dark wood is high maintenance. It shows every bit of dust and dirt and footprints. My vote would be a medium dark floor with a more prominent grain pattern like an oak. Both of your choices would be difficult to live with without daily dustmopping or even twice daily.

Hollysprings is right, more and more HO are realizing how difficult dark hardwood is to keep looking good. It's ironic, because a carpet in deep brown tones is easy to keep clean but that same color on a hard floor is really tough. Oak and Maple can be stained a lot of different colors, that would be a good place to start. Also, I'll put in a plug for the "old fashioned" wood floors that are finished AFTER they are installed. Since you are putting floors in the whole house I imagine you aren't living there. Which means the unholy mess created by sanding & finishing a floor onsite isn't going to be a huge disruption to your life. If you haven't talked with flooring contractors who do this work, and are only looking at the places that sell pre-finished, consider talking to another company before making up your mind. Sometimes the price difference is negligible.

All of this assumes you are not installing over a slab, in which case engineered probably is your best bet.

Good luck!

Do you feel that the 3rd option's color/stain would be hard to maintain. it is a bit darker in real life.

I just tried to post a link to a site that rates engineered wood floors and was told that the site has been banned because of advertizing spam plugging up the forums. I got a lot of information that was about which lines make the best engineered wood flooring. Not sure if it is truth or just advertizing copy. Since I can't post it here, I suggest you google engineered flooring ratings or some such. I probably shouldn't mention the brands that looked good to me but if you are interested say so and I will pm you with what links I found. No gaurantees though. I did this for a friend of my wife and don't think she even followed up on it.