I guess, for me it comes down to "Which one is the more interesting pairing?". Meaning, sometimes I ship the canon pairings and sometimes I don't.
From my experience people still shipped H/Hr after GoF because of OotP, which barely had any R/Hr and Harry moved on from Cho in that book, so people hoped that maybe GoF had all been a red herring and JKR would go for H/Hr after all. Of course that didn't happen and only a few albeit vocal shippers still believed that in the last book H/Hr would happen. Personally, I stopped arguing for them when HBP came out.
The thing I like about Zutara is that there are major issues that would need to be resolved before they can get together and this makes them more interesting to me than Kataang. *shrug*
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From my experience people still shipped H/Hr after GoF because of OotP, which barely had any R/Hr and Harry moved on from Cho in that book, so people hoped that maybe GoF had all been a red herring and JKR would go for H/Hr after all. Of course that didn't happen and only a few albeit vocal shippers still believed that in the last book H/Hr would happen. Personally, I stopped arguing for them when HBP came out.
The thing I like about Zutara is that there are major issues that would need to be resolved before they can get together and this makes them more interesting to me than Kataang. *shrug*