I guess we are all the product of our individual experiences...
SRBeef, we're you referring to the Gall. pigtail step-ins or the plastic ones? I've found the pigtails to be fine but the plastic ones becoming very brittle in a relatively short period of time.
Twisted polywires can leave slivers in your fingers (both plastic and wire). The braided polywire does not fray in the same way as the twisted wires so slivers aren't a problem there. I'll agree aluminum has great conductivity and with difficult to control livestock it can be an effective option.
We've used almost every brand (Gallagher, PEL, Speedrite, Dare, Waikato, Stafix, Premier, and a lot of farm store junk) of electric fence reel over the past 25 years and have found the O'Brien 3:1 geared reel to be the most reliable, durable, and cost effective. We have been using them for about 15 years now. Once you use geared reels, you'll have a hard time doing straight cranks anymore.
We've also used almost every brand of step-in posts (same as above re reels) and found the O'Brien Treadline post to be the most reliable, durable, and cost effective. We've been using the O'Brien step-ins for over 20 years now. We have quite a few of these posts that are 10-15 years old. Most of them I can still bend over into a 'U' and they still come back straight. Occasionally one will break just from age.
We graze center pivots here and the temporary fences I run are usually between 800 - 1000 ft. It usually take 12-15 minutes to take down and put up the 800 ft runs and 18 to 20 minutes to do the 1000 ft runs. Back in MO we used to run just 300-500 ft stretches and those usually took me about 7 minutes to make a paddock change.