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Not quite an army list, but also not "other", so I'll stick with other just to be safe.

For friendly games with newer opponents, I can take my usual Barak Mhornar list with one of the nast-ier endless spells in a bottle, an ironclad full of thunderers to drop near your deployment zone and blast away, and some arkanauts to squat on objectives.

Or I can take the same thing, but with a less nasty endless spell, 15 less thunderers, and Gotrek.

Not sure what's meaner to Beastclaws/Slaanesh/Slaves to Darkness. Gotrek *can* be played around but even when coached I've found that people either forget to or don't quite get how, and I'm not sure if 1 small dwarf carving through armies on his own is quite as fun for the army as it is for the dwarf (me).

Then again, a flying fortress full of mini-cannons + a warp-lightning vortex might be even more frustrating to play against?

Neither is a valid option, but a bit tougher to pull off with the models I have. I could drop the endless spell and take an Endrinmaster, switching my arkanauts for balloon-ineers but I'm not very confident in that being valid as a playstyle for Mhornar.

Important note: while the players are new-er, they play 40k semi-competitively and theoryhammer/listhammer a lot, and are always trying to get the most out of their armies with the knowledge they have. So I expect amateur mistakes/confusing 40k-isms with AoS but also fairly solid lists.

Thanks in advance for any advice or thoughts offered!

Those are both absolutely brutal to drop against new players (you do want them to play you again, right?), but if they are experienced wargames the conceptual strategies around dealing with something like Gotrek will be familiar to them.

Gotrek is more fun for me to use anyways. I think I've only put him on the table 2 or 3 times. I have a little leeway, usually, in how brutal the lists I bring are, because even the most brutal tend to falter for me when actually rolling the dice. One of our recent games say me playing Sons of Behemat vs Beastclaws, and first movement phase of the game I decided to walk through a Baleful Realmgate with my unit of 3 Mancrushers. One zooped off into the aether, never to be seen again.
"Well, what're the chances of me rolling 2 1s on 4 dice?" I say, sending my Warstomper through the Realmgate.
And that's how 2 Mancrusher gargants valiantly tried to fight a 1000 point Beastclaw Raider army.

Or our last game, same opponent, where they made 7 Mystical terrain damage shrugs out of 12 wounds and I failed just about every other wound roll I made.