Alaska Cruise - What room should I pick?

Now that we chose our cruise to be the NCL Jewel from Vancouver to Seward, the next thing to do was choose a state room. Like all cruise ships NCL offers a wide variety of staterooms.
Based on the following reasons we knew our choices would be an Ocean View or Inside Room

1. cost vs. the fact that your barely spend time in your room when there is so much to see and do. One may argue that it would be nice to have the views of the glacier from your balcony, but I am told that its much more majestic to watch it from the open deck and that everyone always finds a place on the deck.
2. Daylight in Alaska lasts for 18 hrs, bright light shining in from balconies may not be preferred afterall 
3. With temps expected to be in 50-60s, leaving the balcony door open wasn't going to happen either.

Inside rooms (ncl link) are the most economical with an added bonus that its pitch dark, so you don't care if the sun is still shining outside. That said, for some members of my party, this would be their first time on a cruise, so a room with "some" view would be nice.

Ocean view rooms (ncl link) are on Deck 4,5 and 8. 

Deck 8 only has limited ocean view rooms and that too only in the aft (front portion of the ship). The aft portion can get bumpy at times. So this was not an option. 

Deck 4 is the lowest deck, possibility of noise , so that was out.  

So we were left with booking our group on Deck 5 and we chose mid-ship for ease of access to all other floors.

We booked a mix of Mid-Ship Oceanview Porthole Window(OF) and  Mid-Ship Oceanview Picture Window (OB) . Note the OF on deck 5 have a capacity for 2 people whereas the OB on deck 5 allows 3. We didn't realize this detail until we entered the passenger count  of 3 on the reservation screen and it wouldn't allow us a porthole room(OF)

Cruise ✅  
Room ✅    
Next up, Port Excursions....

Alaska Cruise - Which cruise do I choose?

When I first began researching about Alaska cruises over a year ago the first thing I did was find out all the cruise companies that operate one way cruises from Vancouver to Alaska and the ports where they stop.

You will notice that Disney is not listed in this. At 5K per room it fell outside of our budget right away.

Our final choice was the NCL - Jewel - Vancouver to Seward. The reasons behind this choice were

1. They offered a one way option which we wanted since we wanted to do a land trip to Denali after the cruise.
2. Embark from Vancouver,Canada. Seattle departures spend a lot of time in the Pacific water before getting into Alaskan waters which to me is a waster. We rather wanted to see one more city on vacation in that time.
3. Disembarkation in Seward - this allowed us to visit both Anchorage and Denali, post cruise.
4. Both Glacier Bay and Hubbard Glacier were on the itinerary - this was important because I had read that Glacier Bay and College Fjords are similar with smaller glacier vs. Hubbard which is different because its a majestic with its long glacial face
5. More than one of our friends had done this cruise with NCL and had liked it.