jwllorens:
However, is there any drawback to using "new" to instantiate an object when setting up the environment (basically, just once within setup()) and then leaving it be and never deleting or creating new instances of the class after that?
I don't really think so (others probably have different opinions). But, no real advantage either. Make sure the pointer that receives the result of 'new' is global. Otherwise, it will go out of scope when setup() exits. This will "orphan" the object that you just created with new. You won't be able to access it anywhere.