There are many options and no 'right' answers. A choice either of you fellows would find acceptable will probably be a function of a wide range of variables: your pocketbook, where you will sail, your tolerance for cold, your fear and genetic predisposition for skin cancer, the quality of your foul weather gear, and whether you do longer distance cruising. I can tell you that, even after living in Florida for some years, I don't think my wife and I could have hacked it physically in the Caribbean without a bimini. And we would have hated to sail in the Baltic, off England's South Coast and at times in the rainy Spanish Rias without a dodger.
Jack, I don't think you can match up a 'companionway' dodger, hard or not, with a full-width bimini; the two sets of dimensions just won't work. Moreover, companionway dodgers (vs. full width dodgers) protect the companionway, not the crew in the cockpit. They've always seemd only half an answer at best to me.
If you want to beat the costs of of a commercial dodger, hard or soft, visit
www.writebyte.com and read Tim's chronicle on the construction of his hard dodger. He's on iteration #3 now and perhaps could have bought 3 new soft dodgers or 2 hard dodgers for what he's invested to date. But of course, the dodger is 'his'. If you want to consider a commercial hard dodger, you might start with Wavestopper. It's a franchise arrangement and you may have a vendor in your area who can show you some examples on a diversity of boats. Commercial hard dodgers usually are built off a standard mold (or small set of molds) to make them affordable, and this means they will not fit on some boats. E.g. the models available in our homeport area stretched too far aft to leave a comfortable space between the dodger aft end and our mizzen mast, a favorite watchstanding position for us. A great set of pics of what looks to me to be a handsome, functional add-on hard dodger can be found at
www.bethandevans.com - and HAWK has certainly been an active test bed.
Dodgers best serve their crews IMO when conditions are rough, and during the long night watches when things can feel generally cold and clammy, even in the tropics at times. Therefore, dodgers IMO should beable to be left up, in which case they need a rigid backbone, which in turn makes aft and side hand-holds all that much more reliable. A strong 'soft' dodger backbone typically uses stanchions under one bow with side hand-holds to make the other bow rigid. This is as opposed to the cheap kinds where the bows only attach to the cabin trunk sides and may be tensioned with webbing straps.
Biminis OTOH present so much windage that I can appreciate a logic that says they should be totally convertible. The problem with this approach is that they can then be very flimsy when up. Add in the tendency some folks have to use the bimini as a foundation for solar panels, and you quickly move in the direction of having a bimini reylying on stanchions on one of its bows, as well. This brings us to a bimini that's hardly convertible. And the bigger a bimini is (for protection), the more it's a challenge to the pocketbook and its convertability. Biminis are great examples of how quickly a boat becomes a compromise.
Jack