I hope this is the right place for this question..

From a list owner's perspective, what does the populus feel is the best mailing list software? What about from a subscriber's perspective?

Without a doubt in my mind. Lyris (http://www.lyris.com) is the best professional hosting software. There are several actual hosts, but we run our own copy of lyris. Lyris has nice features such as mail merge tags, expire dates, password set, and much more.

The only real other choice is http://www.postmastergeneral.com/ but they host the lists on there servers. Majordomo is so behind the times, and not even sure if they ever released a new version. Last one I used had limited features and had no bounce control so you had to remove subs yourself.

Lyris is not hard to manage either, from both points of view.

Personally I'm a fan of ezmlm+qmail. Simple, secure, easy to configure, users can manage their own lists without root intervention, and they are free.