I've been on about 35 or so cruises. And I have one booked for Halloween and one for Thanksgiving (although neither may happen)

My favorite cruise lines are (in order) Celebrity, Royal Caribbean, Holland America, Carnival, Princess/Norwegian.

What I look for is a bigger ship. They measure them in gross tonnage. The more gross tonnage, the more amenities. I usually try to avoid any ships < 100,000 gross tonnage and also older ships. On any of these cruise lines, the smaller ships usually have worse service and food and are older-- except Holland America mostly has smaller ships. Look at a site like vacationstogo.com and you can see the size of the various ships and amenities along with various itineraries.

Carnival has a reputation as a party ship. I think it depends. I like Carnival, but I usually go with singles groups. But I am an active Latter-Day-Saint.

Western Caribbean is good if you want to see some Myan ruins. You can see them in Belize, Cozumel and Costa Maya. Grand Cayman is great for seeing sting rays. Roatan is just a beach resort, but is good. I've done 6-7 western Caribbean cruises, mostly out of Port Canaveral, Miami or Ft Lauderdale. Once out of New Orleans. Jamaica is ok. Bahamas are sometimes in Western, sometimes in Eastern.

I like beach time and for me it's Southern Caribbean. You get less sea days and more days at various islands. Eastern has some of the same islands as southern, but usually has more sea days.

I've also done Hawaii, Alaska, Mediterranean (4 different itineraries), Northern Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Asia twice, and Morocco and the Canaries.

I guess it ended up being more than 2 cents 😉