I do not know what it's like in practice now, but on a purely theoretical basis, if you are trying to solve a completely novel structure with no known homologs,

I do not know what it's like in practice now, but on a purely theoretical basis, if you are trying to solve a completely novel structure with no known homologs, especially if it's something on the scale of a ribosome, direct imaging is always going to be easier than trying to solve the phase problem, both experimentally and computationally.