What would Bella do?
I was the right age to get caught in the Team Edward vs Team Jacob phenomenon. None of my friends were really into Twilight as much as I was, so I never had arguments or merch for this debate. I do remember being aware that it was happening intensely among other fans of the book series. At the time it seemed silly to me, because Team Edward was the obvious choice. Bella herself preferred Edward and never expressed anything but discomfort at the thought of being with Jacob. His constant persistence, and insistence that he knew how she felt even if she wouldn't admit it, was downright nightmarish. Maybe it was because, as a high school girl at the time myself, one of my biggest fears in day to day life was to lose a friend because I didn't return their romantic interest. Once Eclipse released, my dislike for Jacob turned to disgust. If you know the franchise, you know the infamous scene to which I refer.
Of course, taking Bella's own preferences as total gospel misses the point, argue the Jacob supporters. What they're advocating for, rather than what Bella thinks she wants, is what Bella needs. From that perspective, Edward is controlling, inhuman (literally), and attracts danger. Jacob is communicative and human. He keeps his promises and he can offer Bella a much more normal human life than Edward can. I find these arguments tiresome at best, not least because Jacob himself makes them ad naseum in the text even though Bella is vocally unreceptive. If we're really thinking about what's best for Bella, it's clearly neither of these boys. They both would be horrible to date in reality. We aren't talking about reality, though: the point of the series is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And from that perspective, Bella's ultimate wish is to be with Edward. Given the abundance of media in which characters, disproportionately women, don't get what they want, it's very enjoyable to read about one who knows what she wants from the very beginning, never wavers, and gets it in the end despite the many obstacles.
Paranormal romantic archetypes
The only angle to the Edward vs Jacob debate that I've found remotely interesting so far have been the cultural implications of their obvious positioning by the text: Edward, the love interest who is totally preferred in the narrative, is generationally rich, fair-haired, high-society cultured, and pale beyond belief; Jacob, who is obviously secondary to Edward, is the dangerous yet relatable family friend who rides a motorcycle. The dichotomy between these two archetypes is nothing new, but the treatment in Twilight is novel in two ways.
First, in most previous works, the down-to-earth, blood-a-burnin' boy is the heroine's preferred choice over the wealthy straight-laced boy. These works tend to themselves be subverting what would likely happen in reality, where the woman would nearly always marry the rich, socially expected choice. These works draw out the fantasy of what would have happened if the woman instead had "followed her heart". The Twilight series subverts this subversion, asking alternatively: "what if the socially conventional choice was actually also what the heart wanted?" An ultimate wish fulfillment: Bella gets to have her cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, the original subversions were subversive for a reason, showing that it isn't all about money or social standing when it comes to partnership. Twilight unfortunately undoes this complexity by reassuring the reader that, yes: the right choice is the nearly aristocratically wealthy man. And don't worry: you will love him with all your heart, too! In the context of a fantasy novel, there is nothing wrong with the total idealisation of Edward, but against the backdrop of real world racism and classism, it is clearly a problematic fantasy.
Second, and more obviously, the supernatural elements are used to exaggerate the juxtaposition of the two archetypes. Edward is not only rich, pale, and educated: he is so rich he can buy a canary-yellow Porsche 911 Turbo without batting an eye; he is white as snow; and he holds multiple medical degrees, can play the piano flawlessly, and speaks with an old-world cadence and vocabulary. He is a caricature of his archetype because he is a never-aging vampire from the early 1900s. In the same way, Jacob isn't just warm-blooded, part of a Native American tribe, and the unsophisticated but emotionally expressive boy next door: he runs at literally over 100°F (38°C for my fellow metric-users), is a member of a wolf pack that physically can't disobey its alpha, and can't control his anger to the point of vibrating. It is an interesting idea, in concept, to use the supernatural element as a metaphor for the basic romantic tropes; but it doesn't escape my notice that the vampirism only enhances the culturally valued attributes of Edward's archetype, while being a werewolf only worsens the culturally discounted traits of Jacob's. To be clear, there are still negative consequences of Edward's vampirism — his tenuously controlled thirst, dangerous superhuman strength, and surveillance from the Volturi stand out — they just aren't traits commonly associated with the high-class romantic lead; they are simply vampiric traits that do not interact with the romantic tropes in any way. Similarly, Jacob's werewolfness imbues him with good traits, too, but orthogonally to his role as the tempting hot-blooded archetype.
How I saw the Eclipse movie is a funny story. My internship boss at the time (a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who looked a lot like Conan O'Brien) was interested in the movie, since he recognised it was culturally important, but didn't want to go by himself. I guess he was concerned what it might look like if a man went, alone, to a Twilight showing, so he asked me to come with him. There were many plot elements he missed, but his first reaction when leaving the theatre was to remark on the supernaturally codified racial contrast between Edward and Jacob, and the narrative role of the contrast. As a young university student at the time, I hadn't started to think explicitly about these issues yet. His immediate reaction has always stayed with me. Indeed: why are the two halves of the Edward vs Jacob dichtomony depicted the way they are?