In a Perfect World, Rhaenyra Would Have Chosen Harwin Strong
Looks like Harwin Strong just won the 'Unpopular opinion that's actually pretty popular' award.
Sometimes unpopular opinions prove to be actually pretty popular – or at least sufficiently controversial to stir a discussion. Such is the case of the opinion that Harwin Strong would have been a better partner for Princess Rhaenyra than her uncle, Daemon Targaryen, voiced recently on Reddit.
The biggest counterpoint to this opinion was obvious: we hardly see Harwin Strong on screen, and we see even less of him and Rhaenyra as a couple, so we cannot really say much about their relationship.
People wanted to see Daemon ending up with Rhaenyra in large part because their relationship developed gradually over much of the season. Harwin appeared quite briefly.
Oh, and Harwin had a problem of ending up dead by the end of the episode which established him as Rhaenyra's lover, which was unavoidable unless the series wanted to deviate radically from its literary source's plot. (By the way, in Fire & Blood Daemon was named as one of prime suspects for the murder of Strongs, though there was no proof.)
But, as mentioned in that very thread, the idea and that Harwin and Rhaenyra were a better match personality-wise is not actually unpopular, given the fact that Harwin got about a couple of minutes of screentime. In fact, for a character with a couple minutes of screentime Harwin gets pushed as a better choice of partner for Rhaenyra quite a lot.
And it is not actually hard to tell why. We've covered the likely reason before.
It is not so much the matter of Harwin managing to prove herself as a man of good character, as much as of Daemon revealing himself as a man of bad character. And besides their personalities, you can even argue that politically Daemon was a pretty bad husband choice as well – marrying him was probably the only way in which Rhaenyra could properly alienate her loving father, King Viserys, to the point she became unwelcome at the court and the capital turned into a nest of Alicent's supporters.
Sure, Daemon is a good warrior, military commander and dragonrider… but his position at Rhaenyra's side in itself greatly increased the probability of a civil war, without which these skills were not going to come of use.