It's a better choice for you indeed, given your personal interests. I mean, someone like you will be interested in the actual content/structure, not as much in the linguistic aspects. etc. A translation is by far best for that, with Rabelais. There will be enough footnotes such as it is without slowling down even more to look up unusual modern French words that have nothing to do with the work, in the end.

My advice would be to take the linguistic aspect with a grain of salt anyway, for the most part. Your edition will almost certainly be established on one or the other "classic" French editions, themselves based on older "classic" ("scholarly" editions. Those were all massively edited, based off the more widespread 17th-18th century "unexpurged" editions. It's not that content was cut (and the meaning usually is not much altered, nor censored), but that the language itself got altered to make it more intelligible (by and large, the syntax and grammar were altered, the spelling uniformized and many explanations/clarifications - and other linguistic embellishments - were added to the text itself. It's like each generation embellished its Rabelais a bit more).

It's only in the 1990s that a publisher (involved with the Collège de Pataphysique) went back to the original (ie: to multiple copies of the last "revised" edition from Rabelais's lifetime) to re establish the text. This scholarly edition is significantly shorter (the word count has dropped by 15% for Pantagruel...). A major fact that emerged then is that the real Rabelais was much faster paced, and that his games with the language were even more sophisticated (and also diverged more than believed from the language of his time) than the previous classic editions had let believe since the 1600s (eg: it surfaced that his variations in spelling usually did have a purpose, or that Rabelais purposefully screwed the syntax for particular effects). A great deal of literary effects got removed through the alterations (it's been too long since I've read it for specifics, but I remember there's an episode that Rabelais had left totally unpunctuated and the later editions turned his paragraph long tirades into sentences, and in another place he had removed all the spaces between words on purpose, which also rapidly got altered after his lifetime. He also used punctuation weirdly on purpose here and there, and this also got "corrected". In short, the publishers have attempted to make him more accessible while usually being very cautious to retain what they perceived as his intent as to the meaning, and this was taken for the established text at some point. It's all a bit ironic considering how much Rabelais's language has been the major focus of French scholars or that Rabelais's best known admirers/promoters (like Queneau, Vian and most of all Alfred Jarry) have marvelled about the language of Rabelais but didn't actually get to read it for real (which is even more inventive/peculiar/earthy - and funny - than they believed).