I visit both SDF and CDF as members. I found myself visiting CDF less and less for two reasons: one is there is much less updates/traffic at CDF, the other is their organization structure and navigation. I'm talking about the military-related threads. One of the biggest reasons I like SDF is it's my go to source for China-related defense news and comments, including official and unofficial ones, both China-originated or otherwise, plus member comments. Compared to CDF, the news and updates at SDF are much more and timely. This is to a large extent a reflection of the larger member base and traffic. PLA watching takes a lot of efforts because one has to aggregate news and rumors from many different channels. It's quite a challenge for one person to find and read all the possible sources. I speak and understand Chinese very well and used to visit all the major Chinese defense forums in China such as cjdby.net before they were all closed recently. The problem is it takes too much time; those forums have huge traffic and the contents have very low signal-to-noise ratios. I feel that SDF strikes a good balance: you have members read and filter the more important signals and news to avoid large volume of junks, meanwhile there are sufficient traffic and updates to make the contents fresh and timely.
So, my experiences with Chinese defense forums, SDF and other China-related defense forums in English such as CDF and PDF subforums lead me to choose SDF as my go-to Chinese defense forum. This is almost a subconscious choice over time.
Now this is obviously only my experience. I understand everyone's expectation and experience are different.
