I prefer the roans, but rarely pay much attention to it when breeding. Occasionally, I'll try to make sure the ugly paint colored cows get a roan bull to try to break the color pattern.

Some of the breed went hard core solid red in hopes of commercial acceptance and are still pushing the movement today. I'm not sure their attempts were worth the effort but some of them are making it work. A couple western ranches dropped papers, added some red angus blood, and now sell good solid "Red" bulls to quite a few commercial customers. There were even a few herds that went solid white in an attempt to provide bulls for black herds. They mostly crashed and burnt, but good white bulls have been bringing a bit of a premium lately so perhaps they were just well ahead of their time. 

The association put out a "what can blue do for you" slogan a while back. They're 20-30 years too late, but I think they should have pushed the Shorthorn x Angus cross right along side CAB all along. The roan gene was the breed's identifier, it had a decent reputation even within the hard core Angus circles, yet they wanted to bury it. Made no sense to me and would be like the Hereford association ignoring the white face. I'm just glad the board kept the breed from going black when most of the associations threw in the towel and warped their gene pool.