do we have to choose one over the other? Usually.
I've been a lot less convinced that there are any RPGs which, mechanically and thematically, in terms of the kind of gameplay they promote, actually are "perfect" for me, over time.
When I was a teen/twenties, I was quite convinced that it was only a matter of time before I found a perfect or near-perfect RPG, because the variance in quality across RPGs was absolutely massive - from the truly dire, the basic maths don't make sense and the setting/themes suck and it's unbalance, to ones which were the inverse, with good math, great setting/themes, and strong balance between PCs, and so on.
But none of them were quite perfect. Even the ones I liked best had some significant flaw that I couldn't entirely overlook. With D&D, 4E's increase "slowdown" as the game got higher level, and the lack of non-combat abilities gradually wore on me more and more. With Dungeon World, it just couldn't quite do the things that I wished it could, and the PtbA structure just didn't gel with a couple of my players. I could go on back through the years, but even games I really liked had issues.
Popularity is certainly valuable, not just in finding players, though that is part of it, but also in that popular games now get wildly more support than others (there was less of an extreme distance in the 1990s). So having realized perfection probably isn't out there (most popular recent systems have been good-but-not-killer for me), I'm willing to go with decent and popular, rather trying to seek out perfection.
I mean, within reason. I still think you need the right system for the themes/setting you're working with.