For my money, traditional is the superior character set. Traditional has all the beauty, elegance and grace of Chinese characters. Besides that, traditional has all he meaning and etymology still intact, with simplified...not so much.

Take the classic example of the character for love, simplified is 爱 while traditional looks like this 愛. Traditional has a heart 心 in the center of it. Supporters of traditional always say, how can a person love without his or her heart?

Let's take another example. The character for happiness 慶 in the word for celebrate 慶祝. Simplified is made up of 广(vast)＋大 (big)＝庆, while the 慶 in 慶祝 is made up of (among other components) a vast 广 and a love, （which in ancient times was written with just a heart 心 and the character for "go slowly" 夊） ＋ the phonetic 鹿 ＝ happiness. So the question is, how can a person feel happiness without a heart?

These examples are all over. The thing about simplified is, it was created with an emphasis on simplicity of WRITING, so the way they attacked this to just cut out as many strokes as possible. Often removing semantic elements and leaving only the phonetic, EG： 關 guan1 (to close), which was originally made up of 門 (door) +guan 丱. However, when they simplified it, they used the phonetic 关 (also pronounced guan) from a variant character 関, for the modern, simplified character. Without the door, the concept of "close" is compromised.

There were many, many unsatisfactory compromises made when the PRC government created the simplified character set. The emphasis was on two things, 1. phonetics, 2. reduced stroke count.

This leaves the new Chinese characters, in quite a few cases, cut off from their original etymological roots.

The characters I hate the most are sell and buy 买 and 卖 as in their originan forms 買 and 賣, the lower part was a picture of a shell 貝, which was used as money in ancient China. So anything relating to value, money, profit, etc. was often written containing a 貝.

Now, having said all that, simplified is still worth learning as it's used by people from mainland China. As others here have pointed out, the numbers (1.3 billion) alone make it worth learning simplified.

For my money, start off learning one set or the other (I prefer tradtional as mainlanders can read it as well), understand the etymology behind they characters, and learn that character set well before moving on to the other. Once you've learned it, you'll find it's just a small jump from one to the other.