Not usually, just very rarely. [...] 401(k)s have fewer choices and come with fees. Pretty much all IRA accounts will allow you to choose any investment and have no fees.

FWIW, I do bring this up in my main post -- it's just that I'm drawing on my own personal experiences and... in my experience I've always been able to get the options I want without extra fees. In retrospect, that's probably just because of two things:

1. I'm not a particularly choosy investor so the relative lack of salience gives me a blindspot when considering the investor experience.
2. I no longer qualify for deductible IRA contributions so I naturally think about them less than I probably should when giving advice to other people.

In any case, I accept your argument and apologize for the oversight.

Roth IRAs have a soft cap at $129K/$204K with the hard cap at $144K/$214K. This is also your MAGI, not your salary. Only Traditional has that lower limit. You can also use the non-deductible Traditional IRA for a backdoor Roth if you’re over the limit.

Err... you can't deduct contributions to Roth IRAs, period. Moreover, I specifically say beforehand that I'm not talking about Roth accounts in the main bullet points: "This comparison applies to “traditional”, non-ROTH accounts". Forgive me for saying so, but I also felt no need at the time to explain MAGI for the purposes of this comparison -- that's probably on me as a careless layman, so thanks for putting that out there.

EDIT: Credit where it's due, I did mess up talking about the Roth IRA limit in a different part of the thread (here). The error is now corrected and the person responsible has been sacked.