I have a couple of Spartan 2 boards and a few Spartan 3(E) boards. My CPU project runs on a Spartan 3E board and, while I have thought about porting it to an Artix 7 board, I just can't build up any interest in such a project. What I have works and doing something twice is 'production' and I don't do production. So, I will likely always have to use ISE to alter that projects. I haven't done much with the project for the last 11 years except port from S3 to S3E and alter the IO ports and even that was a long time back.
I also have a couple of Arty boards and a couple of the Nexys 4 DDR boards and these require Vivado. I didn't like the startup curve for Vivado and I still don't truly understand the constraints file but after I built a real project (LC3 RISC processor), I got a little way up the path. Some day I will admit to actually preferring Vivado. It's a nice tool. There's a thing about putting aside a well understood tool and taking up a new tool that actually increases the difficulty.
It's a toss-up whether I prefer ISE which I have used for the better part of 15 years or Vivado which I have used for just a couple of projects. I think the nod would go to ISE because I am more comfortable. But that's because of history. Looking forward, Vivado is the way to go. ISE is a dead issue, Xilinx is no longer upgrading it, what it is is all it will ever be. I certainly wouldn't point a newcomer at ISE UNLESS the board in question was sufficiently loaded with gadgets and attractively priced. Otherwise, it's Artix-7 and Vivado.
The ARTY-7 board is modern, uses Vivado but doesn't come with a lot of gadgets. It makes up for that with Arduino compatible headers and a lot of DDR3L ram (I prefer the static ram on the Sparten 3E boards). I thought it used to cost $99 but now I see it's $119. Maybe there is something else in that price range. OTOH, it uses the 35T chip and I don't know what to make of that. I would always prefer the 100T chip but I haven't really tried to stuff a large project in the 35T. If it fits, that's all that matters.
Like it or not, moving forward it is going to be Artix 7 and Vivado, especially for newcomers to the field. Unless, of course, their university is stuck back in time. That happens...