Hey me too, very interesting problem. I also used this method as well. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00104...

Force directed layout is my favorite for this.

Neat. My n was on the order of thousands, so that would have taken a while, but it could have been cached.

...but then the algorithmic complexity goes from O(N) to O(N^2), or at least O(N log N), since points have to interact with each other.

(N denotes the number of points you need to generate)

I confess I've never used this in a situation where time complexity was at all relevant. For one thing, it is possible that a result only needs to be computed once for each N (and per shape, since this approach works on a wider range of shapes than just spheres).