pirate
The reason is that up until recently, the options were Cherry switches (bad) or cheap Chinese clones (worse). Since the patent expired, Cherry switches have been superseded by basically any other switch maker that cares to make one. The only reason to buy Cherry switches these days is blind brand loyalty, as the only switches they outperform are the absolute cheapest of the cheap Chinese clones.
I don't have any experience with Halo switches, but they can't possibly be as badbadnotgood as Cherry Sands, so I would recommend those, especially if they're not that much more expensive. In general I always recommend people avoid tactile switches unless you work in a cramped office with people on top of you, because there is no way to make a tactile switch that feels even half as good as a halfway decent (i.e. not Cherry) clicky switch, but to each his own.
If you want further recommendations: I have had fantastic experiences with Kailh switches, both their recently developed clickbar clicky switches and their linear switches. I've also been enjoying the crap out of my Wooting One for the past few months, which has optoelectric, non-contact-based switches, and they are the smoothest things I've ever had the pleasure to type on. They're far smoother than any linear, Cherry-derived switch I've used, including stuff like the NovelKeys Creams which claim to be self-lubricating. There are also a lot of other 'premium' keyboard makers that are coming out with optoelectric/Hall-effect keyboards that are far smoother than anything you can achieve with a contact-based switch. And finally, the best tactile switches you can get pretty much anywhere are going to be Topre switches, as they're a fundamentally different design from Cherry's (Dome-over-coil vs Plunger-in-box) that work much much better for silent, tactile applications.