OK Jack, I'll stir things a bit just for the hell of it.

You can't beat four snow tires. But I'm not sold on studs as in my experience (maybe more years ago than I remember)the added ice/packed snow traction was not enough to off set the loss due to the studs on dry road.

A rather nasty panic stop to avoid one of my fellow drivers, almost sent me on a trip I didn't want. A few experiments later,with and without studs with the same car, indicated there was sugnificantly less dry road traction with the studded tires.

Of course all this testing was done without any hight tech equipment so form your own conclusions.