I like Mental-Ray (Iray). When he appeared in Maya 2018, I liked messing with him. It's pretty easy to set up. Now Mental-Ray is in the Substance Painter, and gives a pretty good picture. In addition, post-processing settings are built into the rendering engine in the program, which is very convenient.
I honestly don't really like Cycles, they give quite a lot of noise. Of all the render engines, Cycles are my least favorite, because they do not allow you to control lighting, glare, reflection, and so on. I would prefer to use Eevee to adjust as I see fit, or if I use Cycles I have to go into the shading settings to, for example, reduce reflection in some places.