You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe. I don’t know where you’re from, but few people would say that isn’t much.
And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option. Theta is only one of the Greeks. Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.
With respect to “bets” and having them go your way: dude you’re talking about a $200k investment on a property worth $1MM. It seems like your whole view on property ownership is premised on the idea that property values always go up no matter what. That’s no more a fundamental law of nature than the stock market going up, and a bet on the property value for a specific home in a specific location is probably riskier than a broad market fund options play.
I’m also not sure why you’re talking about the full price of a house? A $1MM house with 20% down means the comparator is 200k - you can't get that kind of cash together when you're young any more than you can get it into a retirement account. But to the extent you can, you can back door that into a Roth in 3 years, and you have plenty of stock/options/futures setups that will give you leverage to $1MM notional of exposure. And capital gains on that position are actually tax free by the way, no shenanigans required with 1031s and residential conversion or having to wait until you’re dead to get the tax benefits.
The bottom line is that buying property is rarely the best investment decision quantitatively because you can get equivalent (and often better) returns in the market while maintaining liquidity, meaning that you can almost always pivot into a house at a future date for cheaper (on an adjusted basis). But people FEEL good doing it, so the mainstream view is that owning a house should be a goal. Common sense oftentimes isn’t; owning vs renting is one of those times.