I did prefer EY over EK for a time, I really really liked them (going from nothing to Gold in about 5 minutes) and sang their praises to many people. Then four things happened. I started to notice that quite a lot of the crew were actually not that good. I started to get very tired of seemingly the same half dozen meal choices in J every single month, I started to notice how rubbish their FF program was and lastly, I started to realize that they really did not either fly to a lot of the places I needed to fly to, or with such little frequency to some that they were worthless to me.
All in all EK crew are a bit better than EY, but that is not the deciding factor. Yes even these seemingly limited meal choices are generally far better than what EK offers qualitywise. EK's FF programme is equally as bad, however they can be the best in the World but if they do not fly where and when I need to then they are of little value to me.