I speak both sort-of-semi-functionally. Mandarin is obviously the better chocie if you want something easier and more widely spoken, but Cantonese is infintely cooler. Cantonese has a bit more… cache since not too many people learn it, but it’s also so hard (tones being only one of many reasons) that the number of really successful foreign learners out there is pretty minimal.
my bad, i had generalised. i’ll say instead that being able to read simplified means i can understand (mostly) newspapers from hong kong, china or taiwan without being totally lost.