Location of adjective modifying noun phrase containing prepositional phrase

Question

This question from earlier today quotes the following from Guy de Maupassant (redacted):

Toutes ces personnes […] forment un être spécial, doué […] d’une manière de penser nouvelle …

The order of the prepositional phrase (PP) and the adjective in the bolded bit struck me here. It makes semantic sense for nouvelle ‘new’ to modify manière de penser ‘way of thinking’, and therefore follow it… but I would still instinctively find une manière nouvelle de penser more natural.

In English, at least, adjectives are somehow ‘closer’ to the nouns they modify than PPs (even though it’s harder to test for in English, where adjectives pre-modify and PPs post-modify), but does the same hold true in French – or is it perhaps even the exact opposite in French?

Googling gives about 60 hits for Maupassant’s variant, 13,000 (estimated) for mine, which might indicate that my gut instinct was not fully wrong, at least. Unfortunately, most of those 13,000 seemed to have objects after penser and thus were not actually relevant examples (see section at bottom).

Substituting a less verby example, I tried comparing phrases chaussures blanches de tennis with chaussures de tennis blanches, and again found that both seem to be used (though not much), this time in more equal measures: 10 results for the former, 22 for the latter.

Trying to find any actual references for how such noun phrases are/should be structured has turned up nothing, so I now turn to SE to find an answer.

Questions

1. Is one or the other of the orders N PP Adj and N Adj PP significantly more natural and common in current French, or prescriptively considered more ‘correct’? If so, which one?
2. If N PP Adj is indeed generally more common, were preferences perhaps different earlier (i.e., does the Guy de Maupassant example feel old-timey now, but would have been normal back then)?
3. If there is no significant different in naturalness or frequency, is there a particular difference in meaning between the two? (Apart from potential ambiguity; see below.)

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Constraints

Of course, not every sentence is made equal. There are a number of features which will inevitably make one construction far more likely than the other, such as:

• If one of the modifying phrases is very heavy and the other isn’t, the lighter will virtually always be placed closest to the noun.
  Examples: if the PP contains a verb with an adverb or object (“une manière nouvelle de penser la pratique photographique”), or if there are multiple adjectives (“une manière de penser nouvelle, commune” – as @None points out in a comment, that is in fact what the Maupassant quote says; I’d missed the second adjective originally)

• If either N+PP or N+Adj collocate very strongly, they are less likely to be split up, as they are tight-knit enough to essentially form a single word (semantically, not morphologically).
  Example: le quart d’heure académique would presumably never be phrased as *le quart académique d’heure, since quart d’heure is, for present purposes, a single word

• If it’s ambiguous what the adjective modifies and its position can disambiguate.
  Example: institut de l’art moderne might refer to a modern institute or to modern art, but institut moderne de l’art unambiguously means the former

• If the adjective belongs to the small group of adjectives which can be placed either before or after the noun with no change in meaning, avoiding a ‘pile-up’ after the noun by placing the adjective before it is often the most natural choice.
  Example: une nouvelle manière de penser is in fact by far the most common variant

So for the sake of this question, assume we’re only talking about cases where a noun is loosely modified by a simple PP (simple preposition + noun) and a single non-preposable adjective.