I have always used the Palomar knot to tie on my jigs and snell on the circle hooks when fishing bait (as for cats and carp). I am going to give the loop knot a try this coming open water season. It makes a lot of sense, but I just never got around to it before.
BTW what helped me most was ice fishing. Slow, small and deep and vertical ... Here we also have solid fishing docks that float on a very thick pad of styrofoam and reach out generally to water over 20' deep; so we have overhead structure as well as bottom structure from shallow to deep. Jigging into the dock shadow starting deep and working up the depth breaks until they are located produces a lot of crappies for me.