Best system of election for the legislative branch

[IceAgeComing]

I voted mixed FPTP/PR; because I think that describes the two systems that I most like (MMP and STV).  I used to be big on STV; but I've swung a lot more towards STV recently, especially after the... interesting results of the recent Irish election.

Ideally you'd use MMP with open lists for a national parliament; although that necessitates smaller regions to make ballot papers a decent size.  Then again you don't need that many regional seats to get a decent amount of proportionality - Scotland only has seven seat regions and the effective threshold is around 6.4%.  Another option would be to have larger lists but award the list seats to the losers with the highest percentage of the vote - anything to get rid of the parties being able to put an unpopular person number 1 on the list and make it all but impossible to kick them out.  I'm turn on whether you'd want AV for the constituency vote: it'd probably be better but probably more confusing to explain to people that they have to number one ballot paper but not the other one, that threw a lot of people off here in 2007 (along with idiots deciding to introduce a new ballot paper that has both parliament votes on the same paper without putting instructions on the actual paper - probably sounds perfectly natural to people from other countries but apparently it confused people who ended up voting twice for one vote and not at all for another).

Local elections you'd use STV in four or five member wards; it creates the same effect and MMP is unworkable at that level.