90% of my fishing is with braid, whether saltwater or freshwater. It is thin, strong, and has virtually no stretch. The first and the last qualities are most important to me – incredible control over lure presentation and bite detection. Braid does float and also behaves badly in windy conditions, especially the soft and supple kinds. For that reason I prefer hard PE, typically the four-strand types (often have "4" somewhere in the name). They are much noisier (they "sing" in the guides) than the eight-strand types (almost always have "8" somewhere in the name), but I don't really care about that and they are also typically cheaper and more abrasion resistant (longer lifetime). With that said, some eight-strand PE are hard and some four-strand PE are supple due to special treatments. One thing to remember is that expensive, high end eight-strand PE will most often have much shorter usable lifetime relative to more reasonably priced, often four-strand, types. Ergo, high end braid will be even more expensive in use than one would guess from the price tag.