Well these are generic solvers, meaning that they are tuned to perform on a variety of problems well, so you can easily find cases where you get unexpectedly lo

Well these are generic solvers, meaning that they are tuned to perform on a variety of problems well, so you can easily find cases where you get unexpectedly low performance. My advice is if you are on the clock, just use whatever works best out of the box. Now if you plan to solve this problem thousands of times daily, then I would invest in writing custom callbacks in CPLEX to inject feasible solutions during the search since its heuristics are suffering in your problem case.