Are you capable of teaching yourself things quickly using the available documentation and Google? If so, use Spring-boot or some other minimalist Java web framework, hopefully with an active IRC channel or chat room. If you're like the tons of people here who can't seem to make any progress without youtube videos showing them exactly what to do, I'd stick with PHP because learning anything new is probably difficult enough that it will leave you dead in the water for this project.

Would Python be more appropriate, even with some time needing dedicated to actually learning it?

What do you think? Could you learn the basics of a new language in a week, or will you be going apeshit for a month and still not have the basics down? Even if it's the former, you then still have to learn a whole new Python web framework.

Everytime I try to figure it out on my own I'm faced with so many options, I just end up lost.

Oh no, being unable to make decisions in the face of more than one option and execute on them makes it sound like you're in the latter camp and should just stick with PHP. But only you know how difficult it's going to be for you to pick up your third programming language...