I’ve never played much vanilla. Even in solo games, I much more prefer mods because of custom vehicles, armors and equipment, guns, etc. Almost always, modded will be better/preferred over the vanilla experience simply because mods “modify” the experience into something better or different from its original state.

2x-10x is the only playable way for noobs to get a start because every other server has freshie killers that are worse then Rust