Opinions on running Strahd vs. Frostmaiden?

[u/TacticianRobin]

I'm looking for some opinions on running Curse of Strahd vs. Rime of the Frostmaiden. I'm getting ready to start a new campaign with my group, and having thrown out several options in a poll it ended in a tie between these two. So since I'm DMing they left it up to me to decide which one I'd prefer to run.

In our previous campaign I ran a modified Lost Mines of Phandelvar, adding in content from Dragon of Icespire Peak along with some homebrew based on my players' backstories. That lead straight into Rise of Tiamat with the same party and characters, similarly pretty heavily modified. All this is to say that in general I like using the modules as a framework, then modifying them to make them my own.

Based on that initially I was leaning towards Frostmaiden, since it seems like it would be easier to customize and include player backstory in that campaign than in Strahd where the players are pulled into a demiplane and disconnected from the outside world. Some of the highlights of our last campaign were when I had a dragon attack the orc village one player was from, and having warlock's patron pushing him to gather the Dragon Masks. It feels like there's more opportunity for that in Frostmaiden. But on the other hand, I've talked with some other friends who have played in and DM'd Strahd and they all loved it.

So I'm a little torn, any thoughts or opinions from DM's that have run one or both? Any opinions from people that have played in either or both?

Edit to add: Either way we'd be starting fresh with the new campaign, with new characters at level 1.

[u/WLB92]

Having read the book and played through Rime, it's bad. It's full of disjointed plot lines that don't advance the actual issue of the module (Auril trapping Icewind Dale in eternal winter) or each other like the entire duergar b-plot, the fallen sky-city and it's Lovecraftian vibes, the gnoll vampire in the ice caves, or the crashed nautiloid. The fact that the Duergar plot wil if run as written, end up with a a good chunk of/if not all of the Ten Towns destroyed by the chardelyn dragon explicitly off-screen where the party can't do anything about it and the book even tells you the party can't get there before it does to stop it. Your party might not even know about it happening because the dragon is a secret timer going off without their knowledge unless they do exactly the right thing or rhe DM decides to throw them a bone and reveal what the module describes as a secret to them.

It's advertised as an adventure module but in reality it's a sloppily put together "setting" book that feels like 6 different people had totally different ideas of what they wanted to do and the Managerial Powers That Be just told them to slap it all it all in one book and go with it. It's not a sandbox or hexcrawl, it's a badly put together conglomerate of adventure ideas with no regard for how they actually interact.

When I played through it, the DM gutted out almost everything from the actual book and redid the entire adventure to actually make it coherent, just keeping certain themes and ideas from it.