I've had sand filters and DE filters. I wish I stayed with sand. The only issue with sand is if you ever have to clean the sand out which was after 10 years...Other than that i wish I never strayed.
DE Filter works great but as they say, cleaning those grids semiannually and getting them back into place is a bear, and they have to be replaced when they rip. I would definitely go sand again if I could.

As long as we owned our sand filter which was 20 years, we only had issues with major algae when we were away and our filter broke. We actually added DE type material to the sand and it did the job, but that was where the algae was so bad they reccommended the replacement of the sand in the end... and had buckets and buckets of sand to be thrown out... but when we moved and went DE we wish now, we didn't stray.

How about POOL LIGHTS? What would people buy now?