Right now...I am on the CDT side. So please don't take my CDT away!!!!
The CDT has worked very well for us. We have upgraded more that 135 firewalls in three months. Keep in mind, we can only do these upgrades on weekends. It used to take us more than a year to upgrade everything. The upgrades have been from R77.20 and R77.30 to R80.20 with Jumbo Take. And we are using CDT to roll out HFA's as well. We have already started patching with Take 118, which was recently released. This has dramatically sped up our upgrades and patching cycles. This will be the first time in over 10 Years that all of our firewalls will be on the same version and HFA!
If you have not tried CDT, I would recommend just skipping the basic method and go right to the advanced method and define a deployment plan. Not very hard to do it, and you are going to end up doing this way anyway. So don't bother with basic method.