Machine quilting is not my favorite part of the process. The current quilt I'm working on has some machine quilting and the rest hand-tied. Tried machine quilting all of it, but fast became a pain in the hiney. After fighting it for two days, I remembered several posts here saying "there are no rules", "do it your way".
Stitch-in-the-ditch seems too tiedious to me. I tend to do cross stitching.