I, like many people, started out with a Rubiks 3x3 that I learned on. I bought an F2 thinking it would make me faster, but I foolishly put cubesmith tiles on it that ruined the color recognition and made finger tricks very difficult. After much modding, the rubiks was still the better cube for me. It still is to this day! My f2 sucks... I had this cube until I was about 40ish seconds.
I don't remember much from that time when I was learning f2l and getting 50ish seconds until I had memorized 2look and was averaging 30 secs. All I know is that somewhere in there, I bought my guhong. It was a diy and it was an incredible cube. It remained my main speedcube from that moment on for over a year and a half. I tried getting many other cubes, but none surpassed the guhong. A few that came close were the A6 because of awesome recognition and the A V-f for turn quality and overall speed.
I eventually got an orange plastic lingyun about 2 years ago which beat the guhong because of amazing turn quality and crispiness that I couldn't stop loving. Shortly after though, the Zhanchi came out, and the reviews were fantastic. I bought a zhanchi a few months later and was amazed! It felt more like my guhong than anything else, but it was much faster and more controllable. The zhanchi has remained my main for much of the time since then.
Now, recently there have been some cubes to come out that are finally able to challenge the zhanchi. I no longer have that same first zhanchi from long ago, that one was left behind at some bbq restaurant... But around the time I was finally getting sub 20 (yes I know, it took a while), the funs cube came out. I bought that and my initial impression was amazement that I no longer have to use my crappy colored plastic cubes with horrible recognition (I had been using a purple plastic zhanchi and guhong v2). I recently bought another zhanchi with black plastic, and I'm happy to say that the zhanchi has once again made a comeback. I've been experimenting with brighter stickers for better recognition and now I'm using the purple zhanchi, my black zhanchi, and my funs cube all 3 as mains. I now average about 18 seconds and I'm getting better.