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I've been thinking hard lately about getting a subscription to either Dungeon or Dragon (both is out of the questions, money-wise). I was glad to see these messageboards, so I thought I'd add my questions. I apologize if this is a common question.
Here's my situation:
I'm a DM in the process of building my homebrew world and cosmology; I just started in January so a lot of things are wide open. I have been looking for any world-building information I can find and adapting all sorts of material. I'm looking to make this place very customized. It's a large world so I have room for all sorts of different cultures and I want to eventually delineate groups of prestige classes, feats, optional rules, etc based on region so that I can play different types of campaigns (ie, one area is all-core, one uses certain Unearthed Arcana rules, one uses Frostburn...). What I'm saying is, I'm open to ideas from anywhere. I never use pre-made adventures or settings, although I often take ideas from them.
Would Dungeon or Dragon be more useful to me in world-building? Which is more enjoyable to read? Is there a significant amount of non-adventure material in Dungeon (I lean toward Dragon for the greater variety of content)? I have been looking through Paizo's message boards and they've made me quite excited about getting a subscription. Seeing the editors post so helpfully is tremendously encouraging.
I've also read some bad reviews at Amazon and been somewhat deterred. I hope those reviews were based just on difficulties with the changeover from 2e to 3e. Do you see the quality as improving or declining? How much is directly useful to your campaigns (or would be useful to me, as I've described my needs)? I really like articles about D&D and gaming; general advice and interest is good information for me. My roommate has some older issues of Dragon (from 3e, not 2e or earlier, but also not 3.5), and they're intriguing, but a lot of the information in them I have from rulebooks published later. I don't really have access to a proper game store, and I don't know where to pick up paper copies to look through.
I like to research things pretty thoroughly before buying (limited funds), so any opinions or info would be very helpful. I can only get one or the other on my budget.