Hope all are well, haven't been hanging around much lately. Far too much going on in life lately.
Everyone has great points here. My opinion certainly doesn't matter. But IMHO, the direction of tools you select is mainly a personal preference. As mentioned there are case where one way does better than the other, but generally it doesn't make a difference. Most people don't know how or aren't willing to push their tooling and machines to their full potential. No, using every little bit of horsepower and thrust on a lathe to push a drill or turning tool is not "beating" on a machine. If you are using it in a way that could cause mechanical issues, such as lifting the slide off the ways, then yes this could be considered beating on it.
The only time that hand of tools really starts to become important is when you have a multistream environment, such as a multi-turret machine. Not properly setting up hand of tool, and generally only using RH tools, will cause lots of spindle reversals and will severly limit the opportunity to multitask thus lengthen the cycle times. Why bias toward, RH. So you can drill and turn at the same time. Simple as that. But if you think about it. One turret will be lifting, the other will be pushing. You can't "win" in these cases.
