It's funny, I'm of the understanding most people consider being blind the worst disability. Every blind person I've spoken to though (myself included) agrees that being deaf would be worse.

One thing nobody has mentioned is the social issues. When you're blind, you can still converse with people around you. When you're deaf, that gets a lot harder.

Really it's about what you're used to, you can adjust to nearly everything and the unknown is always scary. With the added complication that so many of the adjustments in life you make for one of the two rely on the other, eg lip reading or road crossings that make noises. The sum s definitely worse than the parts.

I think many people do take their hearing for granted. Perhaps because every time you close your eyes you experience a little bit of blindness but you'd have to make a bit of an effort and purposefully block your ears to simulate deafness

Source: born deaf, lost sight progressively from teens. Being told that I was going blind was the worst thing I could imagine. Given the choice I'd go for deaf over blind by a long way.

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1. It's going to depend on the person, if by "imagine" you mean "visualize". You can't imagine what purple looks like if you've never seen it, for example.
2. We all think the disability(ies) we don't have are the worst thing possible. I've had people tell me they have no idea how I do what I do, given the fact I have absolutely no useable vision whatsoever. I've had to point out that when you've been blind for 30+ years and it's all you know, you get real good at doing all kinds of things real quick, because you don't have an option. I know deaf people who get by just fine. I know deafblind people who get by just fine, some of whom would happily spend the next hour explaining to you the oh so many ways in which you could not be more wrong if you were to suggest otherwise.
3. That post title. Oh, good god damn that post title. Please do better.

Yep agree, would much rather be blind than deaf. I guess the vision problems are just something we're used to though. Would be interesting to ask the deaf community as I imagine the results would be the opposite. Although there's not really any right or wrong answer to the question.

My imagination is so vivid that I actually hallucinate about seeing the world around me when, in fact, I have no vision left.

If I could choose I would rather have gone deaf, because that wouldn't have an impact in my ability to code and I don't really care about social interaction.