TT, 12" Tonearm. Who tried and ended up preferring 12" arm?

If you have a problem with using a dust cover and it is not just in your head it is because your turntable and/or dust cover are designed incorrectly. In either case you get inferior sound particularly if your turntable is in the room with your system. 
The Dust cover can not be mounted to the platform carrying the platter and/or tonearm. The SOTA Cosmos is an excellent example of a turntable beautifully designed for a dust cover. The dust cover is mounted to the external chassis. The sub chassis is suspended inside with the platter and tonearm mounted to it. The SOTA sounds better with it's dustcover down because all the other sound in the room is attenuated over 20 db. The platter, tonearm and cartridge are better isolated from the environment. With the SME there is no external enclosure to mount a dust cover to so I sit the turntable on a platform to which the dust cover is mounted. The dust cover does not touch the SME.
If you have an unsuspended plinth to which the platter, tone arm and dust cover are mounted the dust cover may transfer some vibration at resonance frequencies to the active parts of the turntable making things sound worse. These tables and designs like the VPIs and Clearaudios need to be set on a platform to which the dust cover is mounted then you will improve the sound with a dust cover and prolong the life of your records, tonearm and cartridge. 
This is obvious and the case unless you hear micro vibrations like lewm.
In which case your system is always going to sound lousy and you might as well give up and play cricket.  

That was funny.

Time to throw out all my vinyl replay gear obviously then and grab myself an old ipod and set of earbuds.

I hate cricket...….

Disaster

Dual Arm TT with tt81 and UA-7082 arm arrived from Canada severely damaged.

Box was a mess outside, clearly had been dropped. I had driver note box condition, opened it.

3 legs snapped off base, those plastic legs broken into pieces, two big gouges in top edges of wood base, dust cover corner snapped off. Arm, cartridge, din cable, transformer all ok.

Took damage photos, called UPS 20 minutes after it got here.

UPS picks it up today, does local damage inspection within 2 days, then UPS contacts the seller to process a damage claim.

It was properly packed IMO, but it had a serious fall somehow.

Got my eye on 2 others, but, need refund!!!

Ouch!
Sorry for the disappointing result.
Unfortunately all too common with UPS.
I swear they could break a rubber ball!
Good luck in your renewed search!