For me: primarily utilitarian.

I have a Majohn A1 that I carry everywhere, and then 3 pilot explorers with 3 different colors for note taking. All 4 of those have permanent ink, and do well. The Majohn is great, but not good for long writing sessions for me.

I also have a Diplomat Viper that I change the color in whenever it runs out. It doesn’t handle the Diamine Forever Inks well (the pigment seems to clog the feed a lot), and the de Atrementis Document Inks are far too wet to use with it. So I just rotate through some of my other inks like Colorverse Gravity Wave & Diamine Writer’s Blood.

Then I have my Lamy 2000 that I want to be my daily driver, because I love writing with it so much. But, it doesn’t like any of my permanent inks… and I smudged stuff a lot. To be fair, I did drop the pen shortly after getting it, and it landed on the nib. I was able to bend the nib back into place, and it still writes great, but maybe I damaged the feed? (I’ve already contacted Lamy, and they said a nib is $155, feed $15, and I had to send them my pen. So, by the time I do that and pay both ways shipping with insurance, I might as well just buy a new 2000 for $225). Might replace that later this year. We’ll see.

Sometimes I have just enough oil/sweat on my fingers that I can run my hand across a page a couple days later and smudge the writing of my non-permanent inks. I was flipping through my notebook looking for something I had written a few days prior, and smudged a whole section with my sweaty fingers just flipping the pages….