[ben-smith]

From reading books and doing problems on QM it seems that the schrodinger picture of QM is significantly more popular than the heisenberg one particularly in the more basic courses. Why?
I mean, the H picture is arguably much more natural given it's similarity to classical dynamics (think hamilton-jacobi and poisson brackets)

[Aspiringlawstudent]

Because Schrödinger talked about cats.

[FireGarden]

It's easier; that's literally it. The adoption of wave mechanics over matrix mechanics is talked about a little bit in Majit Kumar's 'Quantum', giving the reason that most physicists at the time were good with their calculus, but had little to no knowledge of linear algebra. Even Heisenberg himself did not know what matrices were, and somehow accidentally discovered them.

[3nTr0pY]

Hmmm, as far as I remember, the Scrhrodinger and Heisenberg pictures were very similar (and certainly equivalent). For the Schrodinger picture, the time dependence is in the state of the system, for the Heisenberg picture it is in the operator. To me, the former seems more natural, and is generally how time dependence is introduced in textbooks.

In all honesty, the distinction, to me, seems to be purely cosmetic. Maybe using one representation makes solving problems of a certain kind a lot easier than another, but I wouldn't be able to give specific examples.