Most of the turntables I've owned were belt drives. AR AX 'tables went wobbly over time, the suspension had the be tuned just so. The best AR based turntable system I heard was owned and operated by a first rate lute player. Those folks spend a significant amount of their lives tuning. A properly set up AR AX is a remarkably good performer. I managed to possess about seven of those, did the surgery on two to attach Grace 707 tonearms, one of those getting all the Merrill Mods.
My Merrill Mod of my AR XA had a Grace 707 arm [this one looks like an SME III] and I didn't replace the power switch [and probably should have] but otherwise this one looks like mine. Pretty solid performer, all the modifications made everything more solid and less resonant, the suspension was much more stable:
I never had much luck with rim drive 'tables. I see there's some sort of cult around old manual Garrard 'tables, but over where I was living Garrards were slapped on portable or semi portable record players as automatic stacking players. If I had headphones to plug in, I'd always hear rumble. I found an old Garrard changer at a thrift store, it had a ceramic flip-over cartridge, useful for transcribing 78s.
I was also "gifted" some PE automatic 'tables recently, couldn't get them to run properly because their complicated mechanics went out of square.
Have to say that overall, had the best luck with an old direct drive semi-automatic [the arm would lift and return at the end of a side] Technics, one of the earliest direct drive turntables.
KPFA had the early Technics SP-10s with SME 3009 mk II arms in their studios, those were really fine, would start on a dime.
But the best turntable, overall, was a Linn Sondek LP-12 with all the trimmings, bought from the aforementioned lute player. Had to sell that within a year due to impoverishment. I'm sure if I hung on to it long enough it would be way out of whack by now. I 'm just not up to the care and feeding of such a fussy beast.