Do you prefer Cersei or Catelyn? They both bring good feature to the table.
This could be quite a complex answer, but i’ll give you my basic answer first off: Cersei.
This is for reasons relating to purely my own, personal taste in characters. If anyone hasn’t realised yet, I have quite a dark palate.
I love Catelyn, but Cersei will always appeal to me more.
They’re a wonderful parallel to each other in many ways. For instance, we have Catelyn (who to me is very much a Tully) but she assimilates her husband’s family’s ways, integrating herself into their sort of ‘culture’, if you like. Then we have Cersei, who did everything she could to do the opposite. Though this could be put down to the fact Catelyn loved her husband, where Cersei did not; so their differences in that area do make a lot of sense (think of how Ned was as opposed to Robert as a husband, and you’ll find some justification there).
But there are similarities I admire. The fact Catelyn is not as ignorant (a harsh word, but there’s few other ways of putting it) as her husband when it comes to the game of thrones, yet when it comes to her children, she will make foolhardy moves to protect them, ones she herself will know are terrible risks (ie. the release of Jaime). It’s nothing to do with her own gain but solely for the protection and love of her children, and I feel Cersei mirrors this in some ways— though it could be argued that her acts are almost always tainted by her greed, I believe just like Catelyn, the lioness would do anything for her children. For example: Catelyn frees Jaime, thinking it will earn the same freedom for her daughters. It’s a disastrous move, but it is done purely out of the wolf-mother’s love for her young. Cersei has Robert's bastards killed (in my opinion, to prevent people realising the similarities between them and their father as opposed to Cersei's children) to conceal their true parentage, and thus protect their lives. Not to mention her reaction toward any slight made toward her children, or any action made that could threaten them-- she is even willing to poison Tommen so to save him from the horrors she believes lay in store for them during the battle of Blackwater. They're two very fierce women.
A lot of people don’t quite comprehend that, or just ignore it completely because it’s so much easier to hate a character than to understand them. Cersei does a lot of dark things, but in her mind they are always justified, and I have such a fascination with the complexity of her mind, her thought process.
I’ll keep this short and end it there, but I agree with you. They both have characteristics I admire, or at least find interesting. Outside of my total bias toward House Lannister, Catelyn is one of the few characters I take a genuine interest in.