I can't find a clear consensus on which is better

That would be because all installers and all installer-generators are hopeless, under- or mis-featured, quixotic, pigheaded and hateful pieces of software. If you have any hope or expectation of being able to produce an installer without pain, anguish, heartbreak, anger, fear, heavyweight profanities and considerable secondary ill-effects on your surrounding co-workers, you can forget that right now.

Writing an installer is usually considerably harder work than rewriting your program not to need "installing". Of course, if your program needs random third-party stuff to be installed (Win32s, Windows Media etc.) then that may not be possible.

Peter