Why is the sierra more sought after than the romeo? What little I've heard the romeo sounds more up my alley.
I'll say when I was a student, there were no R instructors, and the B guys were telling us to stay the hell away from the R. Some guys wanted to do VERTREP, others wanted to do CSAR and SOF training (secretly hoping they'd do it for real, of course), and others wanted all the gucci weapons, and plenty more wanted the shorter FRS.
Nowadays? I'm not sure. The tide is shifting. Some still want to do the overland missions (fair), some want to S expeditionary and hope they get a hospital ship, Italy, or Bahrain (kind of, but less fair, since they can't select exped out of HTs), and others still want a (now slightly shorter) FRS. But I think the word is out: the R is the future, has all the weapons the S has for the most part, and has a clear path for its mission, and to be frank, students are nerdier now than 5 years ago. My peers (2011-2012 ish) were all about going to Iraq and wanting to do "real pilot stuff" in the Medevac or SOF missions (we are almost all a day late for that war/enemy/campaign, but some of us did stand alerts in Iraq against ISIS, or deliver bombs in VERTREP to our ships and allied pals to go drop bombs on ISIS as well). Now, it's very common to hear a student say "well, I really like video games / computer games / technology, so I think the R would be a better fit for me." And that's fair - there's less dynamic flying and plenty more system operating and gucci technology in the R than the S.