Snowboard reviews are mostly useless
Here's an example... I just rode two boards on two consecutive days. One was excellent, the other was almost useless. They're both perfectly good boards, but one happens to have the characteristics I need, the other doesn't. So if you don't weigh precisely 62kgs and ride powder fast, then your experience may differ from mine, hence the value you can get from this is limited.
Lib Tech Trice Pro 157 2011
As seen in "The Art of Flight", no less... must be good, right? From the specs it has a 8.2m sidecut, 7/10 flex, no taper, weight range 120 lbs (55Kgs).
The board's tricked out with all the fashion stuff - lots of colours, crinkle-cut edges, all that stuff which is totally useless in powder. It does seem to have a camber so it would likely be good on piste.
The board is symmetrical front-back ("true twin tip"). I know the chap who invented twin tip, and he doesn't ride powder on one for the same reason they're not really what you want - you need different nose and tail flex characteristics for a good powder ride. The reference stance is centered, and you need to move it back to make it work at all. So now you've a board with the wrong tail shape which is no longer "twin" in any real sense... and it does what you'd expect in powder, which is to try to throw you out of the slope from the tail. There's no "mush" when you want to use the tail to control your speed through the trees.
So like everything else, it's ridable in powder, but it's not a lot of fun for me at least. On alpine stuff such as in the first segments of the video below the board was fine if not particularly sensitive. Once in the trees the tail issues were more obvious.
A smaller board would have less tail trouble, and there is a 153 with weight range of 100lbs (45Kgs) and up, but I usually ride longer than recommended, and you'd lose floatation. I think that the real issue isn't the tail or the board length, but the lack of flex in it. I ride way stiffer boards than this on piste, but I'm not using this on piste.
Burton Joystick 156w 2012
This is the board Jake rides, although he rides in wellington boots and waves his arms around so that's no particular recommendation. It does look well built though - more expensive construction than the Lib Tech, if you care about that. Stick it on the floor and it looks reverse cambered, although the reverse is very weak and if I weighf it down with my (hard) boots alone it's pretty much flat with decambered nose and tail.
It's supposed to be a park board, so I was suspicious of it from the start. Parks are where kids muck about riding iron railings and doing aerial ballet tricks. Not at all what I want.
No taper here, 30cm nose/tail width, 7.7m sidecut radius, weight range 57-79Kg.
Here's how you mount proper 4x4 bindings on a 2011-2012 Burton channel board. The reference stance is centered, like the Trice, and the running length of this model is the same too. Burton are so full of their UVW-camber-rocker-technical-marketing-bullshit that I can't find the specs on their site, but the board looks a little thinner than the Trice. I set back 2-3cm with a 2-3cm narrowing of the reference as I'm not riding duck/ toilet seat stance. Here it is mounted up:
From the first turn it was obvious that the board rides well; it was night and day compared with the Trice.
I didn't feel any of the front-back looseness I've noticed with other camber boards when traversing - it tracks well. With high avalanche risk we traversed a lot, and it didn't miss one line.
There's a little lateral looseness in the nose, presumably caused by the scoop there. I think that's probably intended for novice park riders, but it's easy enough to tame with a bit of hard-boot discipline. I think the board would be better off without it even so.
Turning is positive and the tail can be used to control speed as you'd expect. It's a bit like a small Malolo, or a Fish with a tail. It manages to combine a good slashy feeling with a tail for landings. With the Trice I was having to work, with this I did not.
I rode the Joystick a lot, in all types of snow from wet stuff through crust through dry powder, depths from ankle-deep through about waist deep. It didn't miss a beat even in the most difficult wet/ crusty snow which locks you into the line you're on. I just cranked it out and around and it responded fine. When we finally got to the light and dry stuff I'd forgotten all about the board, which just did what I wanted it to do.
I suspect it could benefit from a bit of taper, and the "scoop" in the nose isn't a good feature, but otherwise this is a really good board for riding heli/ cat powder.
Videos
The first Alpine segments are the Trice in action. The remainder of the video is the Joystick.