Lots of good advice here but I agree everybody's experience and expectations are unique so it's difficult to generalize. As flyerwife mentioned, timing your cruise to off-season, or to short in-between cruises (e.g. 3-4 night cruises occasionally offered out of Seattle to Vancouver and Victoria) or to re-locating cruises (e.g. Vancouver to Florida, trans-atlantic) will generally give you the "bang" you're looking for on a number of different lines.

As for us, after cruises on Princess, Celebrity, Carnival, QM II (Cunard), and HAL, we're trying out Oceania later this Fall, which has been getting good reviews on Cruise Critic.

We're also cruising with an elderly relative on HAL in a few weeks. After about 50 days on HAL over the past several years, we personally think it's become "carnivalized" and has gone seriously downhill, especially in the food area, but we'll still manage to have a great time.

Cruise Critic is indeed a sort of FT of cruising and well worth checking out.

Cheers,
Fredd