Aside from the bickering – my take on this …
The KEY word in this is “flow” – FS bikes just flow better – you can really carve a berm or land a jump and keep riding without the jarring feeling that comes with a HT.
I currently ride a HT – and it’s what I’m most ‘used to’ – but I do get a massive grin when I borrow a FS bike and point it down hill.
With a good FS, technical climbing is improved – just imagine grinding up a slow tricky climb, and then – *stopped* as your rear wheel hangs up on a rock… FS lets you keep going as the wheel doesn’t get ‘stopped’.
But the ball-ache comes from the bearing problems, the weird rattles, the loose feeling, the mystery creak, the ‘out of date’ linkage, the none-existant s/h value, the shock service etc etc.