We are moving to new forms, which will have a gift acknowledement/thank you letter at the top, and a tear-off membership card section at the bottom.  We are doing this to save on cost.

Before, we were generating the acknowledgement letters through Mail/Donor Acknowledgement Letters, and we were generating the membership cards through Mail/Membership Cards.  We were running both functions, marking the gifts as acknowledged and the cards as printed, and we manually matched the letters up to the cards when stuffing the "membership packets".

Now we are faced with which function or work-around process to use to get all of this information on one form.  We could use either function, but each has its drawbacks and inefficiencies.

Does anyone here with membership experience have advice?

Been there, done that, as they say.

If you are (or will be) using barcodes on your membership cards, you will need to run it thru Mail/Membership Cards. That is the only place where you can export the scannable barcode, so that may be the determining factor in which function you use. In my previous (membership) life, we had a combo form like you mentioned, and went this route without problem.