The guided-tour-versus-independent-travel debate isn't really about which is objectively better - it's about which matches how much planning effort you actually want to do versus how much structure you want once you're there.
Beyond logistics being handled, a good guided tour buys local knowledge that's hard to replicate from research alone - the context a guide gives on a site or a culture often makes a bigger difference than the destination itself. The tradeoff is a fixed schedule that doesn't bend to how you're actually feeling that day.
The flexibility of independent travel comes with a real planning cost: booking each piece yourself, researching logistics locally, and accepting that some things will go wrong without someone else managing the fallback plan.
Booking a guided tour for only the most complex or unfamiliar part of a trip - a language barrier, difficult logistics, or a remote area - while traveling independently for the rest, often captures most of the benefit of both approaches without fully committing to either.