Is blackhat more serious and better?
Defcon has a lot more grassroots stuff, but it's grown to a size that it cannot avoid the corporate BS anymore. It's probably one of the biggest and most disruptive conferences in Vegas, venues don't like having 1000s of hackers hanging around slot machines.
Any one of those things sounds unpleasant to me, let alone all 3 at once.
And most corp trips are to black hat, not def con.
I've been offered a trip to black hat before and asked if I could go to def con as well but no. I was thinking of just staying longer on my own dime but we got a travel ban for cost cutting reasons so the whole thing never happened. I wasn't really interested in black hat anyway so I didn't care, I hate corporate PR.
But Vegas to me is a detractor. I hate gambling. I'd love it if it were in NYC or something. Much easier from Europe too.
not true in the vulnerability research space.
Actual engineers are sent to defcon because blackhat talks are advertisements, not educational presentations.
I worked in a "blue team" and we would only get travel approvals for black hat. Even though I've never been as I didn't want to and I was hesitant to visit the US. Black Hat doesn't interest me precisely for the reason you mentioned. I don't want sales pitches, I want unrestricted flow of technical information without marketing motives.
The only problem is it's in an extremely expensive period of the year for hotel stays. For that reason I've never actually been.