Me... I prefer Western riding. It just seem much less complicated than English riding. It also seem to blend in better with Natural horsemanship.
As for the Western saddle, a long time ago I did buy me a Western saddle, but it was the biggest peace of junk I ever owned. Don't get me wrong, the saddle were very comfortable to sit and ride in, I loved it, but after just a few rides, probable no more than 5, I noticed that the rigging (Don't really know what else to call it) were chafing away on the leather panels and would most probably be chafing away my skin after 5 more rides, so I sold the saddle. I'm not saying all western saddles are bad, just this one due to poor design. The other day they had a Western saddle up for sale at the auction. You could see it was well used and still in very good condition. I stopped bidding at R2000 and it eventually sold for close to R3000. I didn't want to pay that much for a saddle, since I hardly ever use a saddle, I just ride bareback. Why, you may ask... Just plain to lazy to hall out the saddle and saddle up.
My point being, saddle don't really matter. I'm perfectly happy riding the western style in my synthetic English saddle, that is if and when I do use it
. If you going for competitions and rodios it obviously will matter, but just for general pleasure riding. Doesn't matter.
As for hurting anyone's feelings, I don't care what style anyone ride, as long as they not hurting the horse through bad riding, and one get bad practices in both Western and English.
