I figured this was a good place to ask, as I am looking for a consensus among historians/people who study history, but do you personally use/prefer using the AD system or the CE system?
I personally prefer BC/AD. I should however point out that I usually write in Dutch in which BC/AD is still by far the most common form.
My reason for this is the BCE/CE is just a hollow change in my opinion. It's still a dating system with at it's core Jezus Christ. Changing the name only tries to obscure this.
Their both the same system but BC/AD is more honest about what it is.
As a prehistorian, and I prefer neither. I usually use "years ago" or "BP"(before present). I agree with u/Toen6 about BCE/BC being a hollow change.
Can I ask a related question inspired by Toen6's answer? To what extent do different non-English historians use AD/BC or CE/BCE? I assume in some languages there's no need to. For example, my Chinese friends found the whole thing odd, since for them it's not 2016 AD, but just 2016 Nian (ie 2016 Year). They weren't able to explain to me what they did for BC though.
(As to the OP, the debate is irrelevant to me because my area of specialisation is entirely in modern History; and academic works about organised crime in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s simply do not need to specify AD rather than BC. Thus, while I personally prefer AD/BC, I feel that this is a matter for Classical Historians and not one on which I'm qualified to comment.)