I'm a salt guy and nothing current. I run Furuno gear, but Simrad was similar. Garmin was just coming onto the scene when my gear was produced, but been on a few boats with Garmin and it's nice and more user friendly/intuitive. Garmin really excels on human interfaces.
IMHO Lowrance and Humminbird were lower consumer grade. My limited personal experience is they change/update models more frequently and drop support for older models. The only recourse is a modest discount on a new unit.