I've had both fresh and salt and have to say that fresh is magnitudes easier. Not sure I'd go to salt again if I was just setting up. 'Course, if you can spend lots of time with it, salt would be OK.
One thing I found out was that the water temp in salt needs to be kept cooler than you'd think - somewhere in the mid 70's, I think. Fairy basslets (known to aquarium dealer as royal grammas) are the hardiest as well as being the prettiest fish for me. Purple and yellow. Atlantic natives as well.
It's a no brainer that a salt tank is far the most spectacular and pretty. But I did learn a good fresh water trick: if you can take the time to vacuum your fresh water tank once a week, the water will be so clear, and the fish so bright, that some folks will accuse you of having a salt water tank. It happened to me more than once.
Fish tanks are wonderful, tell you the truth.
We had a salt tank on Okinawa, Japan...it was the easiest thing in the world for us to take care of...of course we could just go down to the seawall and fill up with new water whenever we wanted. The fish were cheap too as we caught our own...had lots of beauties we did. There was this time we caught a vey small octopus...figured he got out through the lid because we couldn't find him... :-) Then the fish started disappearing. He was really cool though.
I think the other thing that made it easier was that we had it BK (before kids). We put up a fishtank here about a month ago...first time since Okinawa...it's fresh water and we've had to replace 5 fish so far. I think we overfed them. :-( It's a 27 gallon octagon tank down in the kid's school room.
Mrsnad