Bart,
Actually, I'm a big fan of the Golden/Cleansweep combination and am fixing to get another one. Just trying to decide how to go about funding it. I use that combination to profile sites and determine where all the action is and I've been a bit lost without it. Plus there are some sites where that is simply the best combination to hunt it.
Difference between machines come down to feature sets and design intent. Some features are better than others for certain targets. My F5 isn't much good without the Golden/Cleansweep profiling site conditions for me, telling me where the good spots are. My time is so limited that I want to go right to the most productive sites or locations right away.
Give you an example. Got a large sports complex with 5 soccer fields. Which fields see the most use by the folks with the stuff to lose that I'm after? Would take me 5 times as long and expend much more energy trying to figure that out with the F5. Remember, its not just the finds I can recover now, but also the finds I'm going to be recovering in the future. Run through the whole thing with the Golden/Cleansweep, seeing what targets are in the ground, and what field is producing what. I learn right away that field #1, and #2 are busts other than the occasional find. Field #3 sees a lot of action based upon the trash content but contains few coins, while field #4 and 5 gave up lots of clad. During the hunt I might recover a nice silver or gold jewelry item, which is nice, but not the point of the hunt. The point of the hunt was to figure out if this is a good site, what is in use and where I should focus my time next time around. Now I come back a month or six weeks later, totally skip fields 1-4, go directly to fields 4 and 5, validate my decision process with the Golden/Cleansweep combo (maybe fields 1-4 had been hunted by someone else but I hit #4 and #5 before they could but if I again find a good clad count then I know I'm on the right fields) then take out the F5 and gold hunt the most likely spots of soccer fields based upon my prior experience because it has a better feature set for that type of focused hunting.
HH
Mike