I prefer the raw logs. One reason is that Google performs "statistical improvement" like "sessonizing." This act destroys the value of point process data. It wouldn't be found in a stats textbook because the operation destroys valuable information. Also, the concept of Visitors and Users that GA uses isn't transparent to me.

Another fun fact. Since the tracking happens on the client side, there's potentially a ton of truncated data that GA simply misses. Backend server instruments don't suffer the same way.