Having a tough time deciding.

I agree with this. I usually don't find myself hating much about the game. This would be it, if anything. The reason is assault rifle and shooting "ordinary" bullets, in general. In a game where people get electricity, energy, radiation and the likes, bullets seemed so normal for a trained Soldier of Arachnos. Now, when they get the other attacks the bullets seem less pronounced in the build, so I like it. For instance, who cares about your bullets doing slightly less damage, when you have giant spiders to handle your dirty work. Other powers like venom grenade, and the frag grenade also scream "This ain't a normal gun." Getting past that was like a whole other world though. With the repsec, you really feel like you are more than just a normal grunt.

For team play, I like my widow more, because I like making teams awesome. This may be because I am on a defensive support character(controller, defender) or an offensive support character(widows with double leadership.) I forget that "x" attack is one of the weaker ones or "x" character can DPS more. It is then about seeing how fast we can make stuff melt as a group effort.

For solo or small team play, I like my bane more, because I can pretty much guarantee my own relative safety with stuff like placate, or my backup, or outright killing. The debuffing helps more on small teams, because they may not have other debuffs, or they may not have a lot of damage output.

For coolness, I like my bane/crab. The uniform has more options and his backstory(made up) is more interesting. He is an ex-Family boss, who they wouldn't let out, so he infiltrates arachnos to start amassing his army to let himself out and retire.

I also agree. A mature Soldier build, Bane or Crab can be a blast but getting there can be tedious and discouraging. Do a Widow first, getting to level 24 is still a little unpleasant but not as bad as a Soldier. After the level 24 Respec the Widow gets MUCH better.
After enjoying the incredible ride from 24 to 50 on a Widow you'll be able to weather out the tedium of an immature Soldier much easier, you'll know what level of performance to look forward to.

Odd, I found my experience to be exactly the opposite. A level 1-24 widows are primarily melee characters and while they have ok melee def (12.5%, 15% if you can squeeze in combat jumping) it's not great and their def to other positions is just sad prior to getting foresight at L22. Combined with high end cost, slow recharge attacks I found my widow constantly sucking down purple and blue inspirations to survive when solo, or sucking down a ton of damage. 12.5% def is NOT enough to handle the amount of incoming damage you get in melee. High damage, high end, slow recharging attacks are nice once you can slot up enough end and recharge reduction but they are not quite as fun before that.

Soldiers, on the other hand, are primarily ranged and have far more tools to leverage that. They start out with 17.5% ranged def, higher than the widows melee already, plus they have 10% def to all other positions. When you combine wide area web grenade to lock things down, venom grenade and heavy burst for good AE damage and debuffage, and single shot + burst to finish off the big targets you get a fairly effective soloer. You get all of this by L12 by the way.

In groups either character will be fine, although I tend to give props to the soldiers (pre 24 at least) because they get a better maneuvers (+10% def vs the +5% from widows) and they get venom grenade, which is awesome in groups. After 22/24 widows definitely take off - foresight fills in a lot of their def gaps and mind link gives them superior defenses (both personal and for the group) than a soldier, at least when it is up. They also get some interesting resistances to psionic, which is nice on villainside. Prior to that, however, I found them a hard grind solo - so much so that my widow is the one character I PL'ed up to L24 by grouping them with a brute on my second account and left them door sitting while the brute engaged in smash. I have 2 different soldiers (a crab and a huntsman/mace bane) that I soloed up through the low levels without doing this.

You just about nailed it.

I've got both a Night Widow and Bane Spider at 50 and this is the most noticeable difference. Night Widows can, with proper endurance management, chew through hard targets thanks to their quick activating, high damage attacks. Also, having Follow Up allows them to increase their overall DPS without interrupting their attack chain. They play more like stealthy Scrappers.

Banes, on the other hand, function in a manner that's closer to Stalkers. Their attacks have very good DPA but the animation times are longer. They have access to Build Up (As do Widows) and Surveillance. Both powers enable Banes to deliver more damage from Hide. While they do, of course, have more functions than just that they lend themselves very well to delivering a single crushing blow as opposed to sustaining high damage in drawn out battles.

Keep in mind that there are at least 5 different 'standard' VEAT builds, possibly even more with variations on those. (I call them standard because if you refer to a fortunata, nightwidow, crab, bane or huntsman on the forums most folks will have a rough idea of what you mean).

Widows can be either nightwidows or fortunata's. NW's tend to be a bit more bursty as they get crits from hide and CAN take build up and be more of a claws stalker or they can take follow up and be more of a sustained damage claws scrapper. Fortunata's are a ranged psi damage and control combo, much more of a hybrid than the NW.

Soldiers can be crabs and be a mini-tank with ranged AE damage and pets (with sub builds that focus on one more than the other, or a combo of the two), or they can go bane and basically be a mace stalker complete with crits, placate and build up - and I have to respectfully disagree with Timeshadows claim that bane attacks have long animations - the melee attacks, which are the ones a stalker type banes should be using, are very fast (the ranged single target and ranged AE mace attacks DO suck though). The 5th standard build is huntsman - a bane that sticks with the base soldier gun attacks (which are very fast animating and do good damage) and focuses on AE damage and group buffs - they can be amazingly effective in groups.

I currently have a L30 widow who is both a fortunata (build 1) and a nightwidow (build 2) and I am experimenting with both. I think the fortunata is more fun: using psionic tornado to throw everything up in the air, then following up with a psychic scream and single target blasts, but the NW build is likely to be more effective once I have enough recharge and end reduction.

I also have 2 soldiers - a L45 crab who is focusing on tanking and area damage (both ranged and melee) in her first build and will probably use her second build to play a minion master - taking call reinforcements and summon spiderlings, hasten and as much recharge as possible. My second soldier is a bane, with one build as a solo mace stalker type and the second as a group oriented huntsman. My mace bane dishes out HUGE amounts of single target damage and combines decent def with a lot of knockdown, I use this build on Hamidon raids as a yellow mito killer. My Huntsman is an insanely good group character - he has double stacked maneuvers, double assault and tactics which provide +20% def, +30% damage and +15% to hit to the group. Plus he can stack venom grenades 20% resistance debuff with arctic breaths 15% debuff for as much debuff as most corruptors.

I completely agree - this is one of the 'other variations' I mentioned after the sentence you quoted. In fact, my crabs current build is along these lines - I originally went for all ranged but I realized that without wide area web grenade, which I skipped because of redraw, enemies where closing with me anyway. So I respecced to take a mix - the two single target blasts, suppression, venom grenade, arm lash and frenzy. I also picked up boxing, tough and weave. Ultimately I plan on having her softcapped to all positions and with about 50% smashing/lethal def and about 40% to all other types of damage (except psionic) - basically a def/res tank that can unleash both ranged and melee damage.

EDIT: The primary advantage a melee crab has over a bane is AE damage - unless banes dip into thier really bad mace AE blasts or into the base soldier tree (and suffer from a ton of redraw) they pretty much only have crowd control - its very nice AE, but its still a single attack. Crabs have venom grenade, suppression, a narrow cone in arm lash and a pbae in frenzy. Even if you skip suppression because of the long animation, that's still 3 good AE attacks plus the omega maneuver.