>Barks also preferred Van Horn to Rosa, and he was fucking boring.
As far as any review I can find goes, his preference for Van Horn was in his staging of comics(very close to Barks own) and and visual style(which Barks considered significantly better than his own), not necessarily as a writer.
That being said, considering Barks generally tended not to like Rosa's tendency to revisit his old stuff and seemingly outright did not like Life and Times, it can probably be inferred that he indeed preferred Van Horn, yes.
As far as art went, he always liked the Europeans and Vicar:
>CB: Those guys in Italy and a number of people working for Egmont. They are marvelous artists. They are doing much better drawings of the ducks and other Disney characters than I was able to do. Daan Jippes for example has been very good doing Disney style for many years. Vicar who comes from Chile is excellent and there are a number of them up there in the Nordic countries and down in Spain. Those guys are superb artists.
Duck Thread
Juan Green
Evan Brown
He is the star of the films I draw him into! Here's one ain't released yet.