You can't rely only in proactive modules, mainly home users that are not common from being infected by a real zero day malware.
Eset has advantage on being the first to include new malware signatures, and that's essencial to remove and clean infected PCs, or even blocked intrusion attempts. Moreover, it has a great firewall and excellent heuristics (detecting variants of malware).
Of course would be better if you can choose a complete suite who's better on both (proactive and signatures), like Kaspersky or Norton, but that's not the case.
Signatures are important, otherwise we would use only proactive defense.
Agreed.
Having one piece of tech doesn't solve all your problems. Everything still has a place including signatures. Proactive modules like bb and such can miss things, so they aren't perfect either. I know it's nice to feel comfortable in knowing that the security product you use will catch everything, or the vast majority at least, but it won't matter if you get infected with a piece of ransomware (for example) and you don't have any backups of your data. At that point it doesn't matter if your product always scores high, it still got through and you lost your data.
Which brings me to a point I always mention and that is your overall sufring/computing habits will be the biggest factor in all of this. If you practice safe surfing/computing habits, more than likely you will be fine no matter which product you use. On the other hand, if you practice unsafe habits, well then at some point you will lose that battle, as no product is perfect.
Education and preaching is often forgotten in all of this, especially a vs b threads. People are more concerned with the product doing all the work for them, rather than it being the other way around. A security product is just one piece in all of this, but your habits will always be the biggest factor IMHO. People always try to use a security program such as Kaspersky (for example) to band aid the real issue of letting someone continue to practice unsafe computing habits. Don't get me wrong, Kaspersky is an excellent program, but we should still be educating users, rather than saying, here use this, you'll never get infected.
As for this thread, as I've already said both Eset and Emsisoft are excellent, so just choose which one you like most. If you practice safe computing habits, either option is more than sufficient. Eset has improved a lot with their current version and they are usually the first few to have signatures for new malware. Since we are geeks here, if one wants to take advantage of Eset's HIPS, than you can make it more powerful and bullet proof than any other solution mentioned. For average users however, even without tweaking HIPS, it's still more than enough IMHO. It's only us geek that get caught up in these semantics.