Real ice cream, with sugar and a good amount of butterfat is a freaking joy. The cheap crap that tastes like frozen milk is not even worth popping the seal on. Yeah, looking at you Breyer's.
Most of the basic supermarket brands are absolutely junk these days, filled with all kinds of shit. Some aren't even legally allowed to be called "Ice Cream", and must settle for "frozen dairy dessert." Blah.
Some of the old standbys are still based around whole classical ingredients. Ben & Jerry's will always have a spot in my heart, so damn good, with good ingredients.
Graeter's has become one of my favorites, it has such a pure "ice cream" quality to it. Ben & Jerry's is delicious but heavier on the cream and richness.
From what I had of Talenti, it's pretty damn good.
Plus the good brands are all dense and pure, whereas the brands like Breyer's and ilk are all super-whipped with air, the amount of product you get in their 1.5qt containers, or whatever size they have shrunken too now, is surely [nearly] equal to a pint of the good stuff.
I mean, the same stuff that's in vaporizers and smoke machines, propylene glycol, is one of the fillers in the cheap ice cream arsenal. So many artificial flavors and false thickeners, even the chocolate flavors are usually false chocolate, perhaps only containing cocoa. There should be chocolate liquor and cocoa butter, or it ain't chocolate!
/rant