Does anyone prefer to whip over all other weapons?

Other people have pretty much covered this, but here's my take. The whip is situational, like most of the weapons. I found two or three spots where the whip gave the most convenient and efficient solution to what I was trying to do -- particularly within the context of grinding away shards. A good example of a different weapon fulfilling this role would be the Swordwhip, which, uniquely in the game, allows one to hit things more or less instantly from almost fully across the screen, potentially without pause, and I've found a few scenarios where that was useful.

It's worth noting that the reason why the whip functions the way it does -- a wide and unusual attack arc with an almost excessively large windup -- is likely because the developers were conscious of making the whip too similar in behavior to how it manifests in real Castlevania games. Anything besides what they ultimately came up with would probably have been essentially no different from whips in those games. Maybe a little overcautious, given the considerable direct parallels between Bloodstained and Symphony of the Night, but still understandable.