It's not really clear which one is "objectively better" to look at. The tradeoffs are exactly those that you've listed. But you know, for a given point of time

It's not really clear which one is "objectively better" to look at. The tradeoffs are exactly those that you've listed. But you know, for a given point of time you can look at the entire yield curve - that's what I usually do. And when it comes to plotting you can plot both differences (it's easy to do in FRED, you can do many fun things with time series there).