Rejected MICCAI paper: workshop -> journal/conference or directly journal/conference [R]

Premise: this work is my first year PhD, and I dropped out for personal reasons. I still want to do research but independently.

I have tried to submit my explainability paper to MICCAI. Sadly, for doubtful/good reasons, it got rejected.

Among the reviewers, one explicitly suggested to make it stronger and that the work is "novel".

I was wondering if a good strategy would be to work on it more (maybe improving also the time it takes for doing experiments, since currently it's a way too big model) and then submitting it to a journal, or first submitting to a workshop and then extend the research for a journal publication.

Strategically wise, is it good to first workshop and then journal? MLCN/iMIMIC would be my choices. But I hear a lot about workshop being suboptimal. Given I am not currently optimising for a PhD, does it make sense to go for the long run and publish it as a journal paper/another conference?

Thank you in advance.