I'm completely lost why the location on the filesystem is important??? you know - "space is space"
To answer your question, no matter what you do, the ownership of the Files in XAMMP/LAMMP will probably need to remain nobody:root for it to work, you won't AFAIK, be able to chown the XAMPP files to your login account and have it work.
You would also, I believe, need to 'fix' all the configuration files and the LAMPP scripts -= this is not XAMPP for Windows, which just does not give a rats behind where it is (other than folders with special characters).
These are all 'my opinions', based on my knowledge.
AND - gee - you know you can create a user in MySQL other than 'root', you know...
Good Luckl
yisf