I say this abstractly as I'm curious what your answer is and I think it might be very helpful to others considering your experience. (I just had to google "sr-iov" as I was typing this :) )
That said, SR-IOV isn't a BAD option if you don't care about live migration of VMs over a lifespan potentially longer than the underlying hardware platform. It's a good option if you can live with host-hardware-specific drivers in your guests, you're willing to standardize on a specific NIC as host hardware for the fleet where you'll be running VMs, and you're willing to deal with the resource commitment it requires to deliver on its performance promises.
So you can assign a virtual function from any SR-IOV-capable NIC into a VM using common code, but what the guest sees inside the VM will still be an Intel, Mellanox, Chelsio, etc. device. Naturally they'll need a driver for that device.
If your fleet includes NICs from a variety of vendors, you'd never be able to live migrate VMs between hosts with different NIC models. Until recently, no vendor I knew of included the relevant serialization and deserialization functionality to allow for live migration at all.