David,
My personal view, after over 5 decades decades of motoring leans heavily towards discs - certainly on the front.
My first car was an 1100, then a Cortina, followed by an Anglia, another Cortina and then a Mk1 Escort. All secondhand, of course.
Discs, back then were considered more expensive but had advantages over drums - no regular adjustment necessary and they soon dried out out after immersion!
The 1500GT Anglia already had a servo disc conversion (from a Capri) and literally almost stood on its nose when braked heavily (it had the soft Capri coil springs fitted).
The first Cortina was non-servo disc braked - pretty reasonable except they faded with heavy use (we drove our cars hard and the 1500GT engines easily out-performed the brakes). Fitting a servo, with harder grade pads, was the antidote to that problem.
My second Cortina had drums and was forever needing adjustment - the rears were terrible, too. One was soon driving around with the hand brake slightly applied (to maintain minimum pedal movement) if they were not adjusted. I cannot recall if we fitted discs to that one, but likely did.
The Escort came along eventually - ex panda car with drums. That was B awful. When the engine was upgraded to 1500GT+, the rest of the car had been, or was, upgraded to make it a very good road car
. IIRC, the rear drums may have been self-adjusting shoes, but maybe not. Self-adjusting shoes were a real god-send back then and still are, now.
That brings us to fronts being disc braked on all my cars, ever since, as standard - and always servo assisted, with discs fitted to rears on most performance cars since the 1990s(?).
I would only use drums at the front if there was no other immediate alternative. Large drums can be good, but those that were built to a price were only adequate, IMO.
FIT DISCS IF YOU HAVE THE OPTION. They are superior to drums. Think - how many cars are fitted with drums at the front these days. Drums are adequate, but that is all, is my view for 21st century motoring. Even my early 1970s motorcycle has a disc at the front. It’s not difficult to admit that discs are better, but there will always be some that either disagree (for their own personal reasons) - or know no better.
Also, I’ve had few problems with disc calipers over the decades. Not zero, but better than changing slave cylinders, made in china, on a fairly regular basis.
Dual circuit brakes are yet another issue. I’ve suffered brake failure more than twice over those decades (I’ve only ever purchased one new car). I don’t like that. The last was a sudden unexpected master cylinder failure only a few years ago on a modern dual circuit car. My fault because I normally check the pedal travel before starting off (one has to do that with modern automatics, these days?).