All you will get here is a pile of opinions on tires, and what works for someone may not work for everyone.
I routinely see a LOT of really garbage tires on cars here, so bad I could not stand to drive them across the street, yet people will drive them all over every day and not know any better.
For tires, understand that you most often get what you pay for, so the area of bang for the buck can vary depending on what you expect. A long lasting tire (high tread wear number) will have a hard compound, and thus will obviously be noisier, heavier, and have poorer traction especially in rain. There is no free lunch here. A soft compound tire will be quieter, grip better wet or dry, but will have a lower tread wear number... so it simply won't last as long. Which is better? That is up to you. Some people drive pretty conservatively, and do not mind poorer performance and more road noise so long as they can drive them further without needing replacement. And some people will deem their tires worn out before they hit the wear bars, other people will run the same tires INTO the wear bars. And that difference on the same car could be as much as 25k miles of driving.
So you can take the "I got XXXX miles out of my tires" statements with a grain of salt unless you SEE the ones they took off. Because I assure you, I remove tires from people's cars all the time that were clearly unsafe for quite some time. We like to call those 'white knuckle miles' because that is how I would feel driving with them.
I also see tires that are so awful square and chopped up that you'd think the car has four bad wheel bearings. You can FEEL them just rolling 5 mph across our shop floor, they are that bad. Yet plenty of people will look at them and say "well they have plenty of tread", never mind that only half of the tread is actually contacting the road surface at any one given time, but whatever.
Just some general rules of thumb:
As stated above, longevity and performance are at odds with one another, with price somewhere in there too. You cannot get the best of all three, best to pick two.
Stay away from anything directional, because then you cannot cross rotate them, which means any tendencies for inner edge scalloping cannot be reversed. This tendency is MUCH more pronounced on wider lower profile tires, a size that is a "performance" oriented arrangement, which means if you get something that has a higher tread wear number, know that chances are the tires could possibly be VERY noisy long before they are "worn out".
Larger, wider tires will sacrifice both ride quality and fuel economy. They will also cost more and not last as long or remain as smooth.
Pay attention to proper load and speed ratings, and know that a heavier load or a higher speed rating is both unnecessary and will be a heavier tire.