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I lile to play with themed armies as much as possible, regardless of whether the army can really be that competetive.

I find myself struggling to put together a list with Primaris and Old Marimes even though the old marine units would fill some of the massive holes in my list.

Thankfully my guard allows me to build a themed, competitve force, as does my knights and admech; but still. I have a bunch of old marines and a rather nice, but limited anti-tank army of Primaris.

I like a force that can pack a punch, but is still thematic. I aim for the best of both worlds but erring on the side of thematic. I don't like being tabled Turn 2 because I bought what was pretty, but also happened to be Tier F.

For example, I really like mono-armies, so my Guard list contains just Guard even when it comes to super heavies. I try to stick to units that are powerful, but if one of those is a model I absolutely cannot stand to look at - hello, Taurox - I'll still give it a miss.

I try for both. It grossly offends my sensibilities to ignore theme/fluff and go straight for extreme comp min/max builds, so I like to have a theme that at least tries to stick to the established source material while trying to be as good as it can within that framework.

I try to build as competitive a list as possible within the theme I've adopted/dreamed up.

In cases of conflict, fluff beats crunch.

Competitive.

I try for both. I run a Knight Lance (2 Gallants + Helverin) because having a single Knight without a lancemate seems odd, even if the Castellan is a stronger option. I run them with allied guard in the same color scheme to represent "household retainers". The the tanks even have Terryn insignia on them to represent their loyalty, with Cadian insignia on the other side of the turret to show they're originally from Cadia, but joined Terryn's household Guard after Cadia was destroyed.

Looks pretty good IMO, works well on the tabletop, and has a cool fluff backstory I think.

Hard to answer in 40k because I play Sisters, we don't have enough choice that you could make unfluffy efficient lists.
Though since I play pure Sister, I guess the answer is fluff? I still try to take the best Sisters units I can, though.
It's much more obvious in Warmahorde. I play Trollkin, but with a very strong self-imposed theme of "Military badass trollkin", so only trollkins using powder weapons and looking military (as opposed to those using powder weapons but fitting the bandit/western desperados trope). I still used to play burrowers a lot when that unit was very strong, and shelved them when the unit become useless, one of the worst in the whole game, and untouched by erratas for many years despite it, though.

Bit of both I guess. Most competitive lists feel perfectly fluffy to me anyway, but I like focusing on aspects of the Inquisition for my armies.