Hi,
you have a third choice 
You can use artist credits to separately credit Benjamin Luxon and Bill Crofut, and use a trailing join phrase to add “& Friends” at the end.
When creating an artist credit, notice that each artist field has a “join phrase” after the name (for “and” or “feat.” or whatever). Normally you’d ignore the join phrase for the last artist, but in this case you’d add “& Friends”.
That’s how I’d do it, anyway. Similar question asked here.
Note: I don’t know how “merge rather than delete” should be applied in this case. Choose one of the two artists at random?