Ha! You got me on that one, sunworshiper. I'm the one who started the other thread about Angie, and I had even speculated about sandy soil! But no one backed that up. Forgetting sh*t in my semi-old age (68)! I've kept my tree because it's an awesome, perfect-growing tree with beautiful fruit. The fruit is still variable in flavor, but it's so different than Pickering that it's a good early mango to have as a companion.
No worries John! I hope when I'm 68 I'm still growing mangos=)
For all the newbies out there trying to wade through all the info, here's the info I'd have liked to been able to find easily for getting started:
* No variety has significantly better cold tolerance, they are all about the same and will require protection if the temps drop below 32F
* All varieties will require pruning to keep small. Ones that are listed as "dwarf", "compact", "low vigor" or with "short internode lengths" will be easier to keep small. I chose compact varieties, and I still regularly prune off 2-6' of height each year to keep them small enough that I can frost protect
* Environmental factors like kind of soil, amount of moisture, and fertilizer can impact flavor. Some varieties are very stable, and have fruit with consistent quality from year to year despite a wide range of environmental factors. Other varieties are more sensitive, for example cookiemonster helped me figure out that my soil is so sandy I'd have to add massive quantities of gypsum to keep my Cogshall from having jelly seed. Too much work for me, I'm topworking that one too. So if you can only have one tree, might be worth it to make sure it is a variety that has consistent quality. If you can have a whole orchard full of trees, then you can just chuck the ones that taste bad and still have plenty of tasty ones.
* Different varieties can have substantially different disease tolerances, so it is worth understanding what diseases are prevalent in your area and finding resistant varieties
* Don't worry too much about getting the perfect variety. If you get a healthy tree to grow and you don't like the taste of the fruit (or just find a variety you like more), learning to graft is easy and you can convert it to a different variety, a process that takes a lot less time than planting a new tree. Of the 4 original trees I planted, 1 lost to frost and I replanted a different variety, 2 have been topworked to different varieties and only one of the original trees remains untouched (Manilita).
All that said, mangos are second only to lychee as my favorite fruit trees. They require way less work to grow than citrus, and it is a complete joy to harvest each fruit!