Superconducting qubits let me get a working two-qubit gate running in under a week on the cloud rig that was actually available. The trapped-ion option stalled on calibration and photonic kept dropping fidelity below 90 percent in the same simulator. I started with ions because the long coherence times looked perfect for the small algorithm I wanted to test, but the control lasers and trap stability just weren’t practical without lab gear I don’t have. Photonic felt like the future for scaling, yet every run lost too many photons to make error rates usable. Superconducting won by default on speed to first result even if the dilution fridge noise is already showing up. Did the calibration stall on ions match what showed up when you tried the same small algorithm?