My situation is loosely similar to yours (except I made the mistake of buying at a timeshare presentation instead of resale), so I thought I would respond to this. There are many people on this forum with much more timeshare experience than I have, and I am a newbie on this forum, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I am an RCI member, and I use the RCI system and RCI points. I do not know anything about other points systems or memberships. Obtaining the RCI membership was part of my original purchase process, and my original purchase was a "points" week.
There is at least one resort I know of with relatively low maintenance fees and relatively high points, and there may be others that are better deals. I have been there a couple times so far (it is not the resort I bought at the timeshare presentation). It is Grandview at Las Vegas. It is an RCI Gold Crown (i.e., top tier, five star, etc.) resort. I went to a timeshare presentation there (didn't buy at the presentation that time). It looks like their maintenance fees are around $375 for a 1-bedroom unit. The fees for 2-bedroom units are double that. (At Grandview, "2-bedrooms" actually are 2 individual, adjoining 1-bedroom units. You go in a main locked door from the hall, and then there are separate locked doors into each unit.) 1-bedroom units get 49,000 points for most weeks of the year (double that for 2-bedroom units). A few weeks are either 30,500 or 40,000 points, and there are some weeks with 61,000 points. (Again, double those amounts for 2-bedroom units.)
You can search various resale websites to find deals. There also are deals on eBay. There is even a website for "free" timeshares, with the sellers presumably paying all closing costs. One such website is Sumday Vacations (I saw decent reviews for them on this forum). Theirs are not free, but you can find Grandview timeshares on there for $29 ("clearance" price), many around $350, some around $600, and then there are some listed for higher prices. Again, it seems the sellers are paying all the closing costs for these. You can also find deals like this for other Gold Crown resorts, but watch out for higher maintenance fees. Of course, I wish I would have known about these resale deals before I spent so much money the first time.
I am in the process of buying a 1-bedroom triennial unit at Grandview for $349 through Sumday. This is a once-every-three years use, and the maintenance fees and points are spread through the 3 years - in other words, 1/3 of the maintenance fee and 1/3 of the points each year. The process seems to be going smoothly, and the only holdup is I am in the middle of the 10-day cancellation period, and Sumday is probably not doing anything until this 10-day period runs out. I probably will not use the points to stay at Grandview. I am saving the points for use elsewhere, because Grandview is one of those that seems to always have "last call" deals on RCI (currently $279 for the week, and then there sometimes are sales for lower than that). The same units that have "last call" deals also seem to be available for discounted points (under 10,000), although RCI will charge an exchange fee, which I think is $179.
So, I think what you have in mind should work. You just need to shop for a good deal, a good, high quality resort with relatively low maintenance fees, and make sure you get enough points to use at the resort you want to go to.
One thing to look out for. If you want to use points, you should make sure you are buying a "points" week and not a "weeks" week. RCI explained the difference to me. Sumday will indicate in their listings how many RCI points each unit is worth, and if they do that, I assume it is a "points" week. If there is no reference to points, I assume it is a "weeks" week. (I saw "diamond" points in one of their listings - I have no idea what that is.) The difference is that you need RCI points to use at other resorts. (It might be possible to exchange weeks as well through RCI; I have not investigated that.) From what I understand, if you have (or buy) a "weeks" week, it costs a lot of money (perhaps thousands for some reason) to turn it into a "points" week. The triennial Grandview week I bought indicated it came with RCI points.
A "points" week is still a deeded week, although I have seen listings for "floating" weeks as well. When they say "floating" weeks, it still might be deeded weeks, but they might be saying that because you are not locked into using your deeded week, i.e., you can "float" to other weeks. All of the Sumday listings I looked at refer to a specific deeded week.
I called RCI to find out how to get my week entered into their system after the closing, and it seems like a simple process and should work. They said the cost is $0 (as long as it is a "points" week). I will find out later how well this works.
If you are not already an RCI member, you will have to become one to do this. I do not think it is too costly.
) many years ago in my very first timeshare purchase, when I bought a "floating" week ownership whose weeks eligible for reservation did not include any week or season that I would ever have wanted to reserve or use there. I ended up giving that ownership away for next to nothing within a year (fortunately, I had paid very little for it in the resale market). The seller never disclosed to me the very restrictive "floating" week reservation constraints and limitations at that facility and, at the time, I simply did not yet know enough about timeshares to ask all of the right questions and / or to dig deeper for that missing, invisible (...but critically important) detail. 