Thought I'd be the first to open this Pandora's box. What are your favourite brands and types of watercolour paper?

I started out with some of my wife's leftover paper from her art school days. Turned out it was a half decent Fabriano paper, but a cheap, lightweight, non-cotton one. It was fine for early exercises, but after a couple of weeks I needed some more, and ordered a block of Daler Rowney's The Langton rough, 300gsm, non-cotton version. This was a huge step up, and I enjoyed that for a couple of months. Then one day I came upon a special offer on the A3 pads from Arches, and having registered that most professional painters recommend going for cotton from an early stage, I decided to buy a rough pad and a CP pad, 300gsm. And wow! The first time I tried them, I actually got chills.

Since then I've tried a couple of other 100% cotton ones, mainly The Langton Prestige and Saunders Waterford, both rough and CP. After having painting on, and getting used to, Arches, I found SW really hard to handle at first, but after getting used to it, that's now my preferred paper. The Langton Prestige is also nice, however I suspect it's only been sized on one side? I might be wrong, but I found the back really hard to paint on.

Good paper is very expensive, though, and one of the struggles of being a beginner is seeing all those precious cotton fiber sheets, in the bottom of the bin. Which leads me to my question: Have any of you tried painting on the Saunders Waterford, 190gsm sheets (or the like)? How does it behave when you only mask it down, or pre-stretch, or wet both sides before painting?

Please, feel free to share your paper experiments!