Reflection from a recent drive home:

Every year that goes by my line gets a little thinner and my rods get a little lighter or softer/more flexible. Just something I have been thinking about as I've skilled up over time. I'm in Texas so it's relative - from 20lb (tatsu diameter) to 17lb to now I'm starting to spool a lot of 15 as the default. 

 

And the only thing that gets braid to leader is a spinning rod. 

 

The one exception are things like fishing around timber, I'm going right back up, maybe to 22.

 

 

I fish lighter lines than most for the majority of techniques, except my big heavy swimbaits. Frogs of course are straight 50lb braid.

If that’s thin, then my line is thin enough to be invisible when viewed from the side. 
 

I realized within my first 3 years of fishing thinner diameter lines seemed to get me more bites. 
 

So I developed the axiom, “islandbass will use the thinnest diameter, lightest lines he can get away with.”

 

And it works for me quite well. We have a winter season in my neck of the woods and as a result, I’m forced to ponder and contemplate on fishing, analyzing and over analyzing to the point of getting cabin fever. One such result is that thinnest/lightest line you can get away with in actuality IS the appropriate line for the task at hand. Go figure. Winter has been over for a while now. 
 

So in @txchaser’s timber case, if I were to face that, perhaps 22lb is realistically the lightest line I can get away with. In my area, my scenarios allow me to use line as light as 6# test (DS) thru 14-17# mono for my heaviest cover which is lily pads at the worst. 

I'm actually experiencing the opposite. I started fishing everything with medium power rods and 10lb mono. I was emphatic that this was enough for everything, including most frog fishing. And it kinda was.

 

These days, almost every rod on my boat is a "heavy" power. I use quotation marks because "heavy" doesn't always mean "heavy" (like in the case of Dobyns, for example). But I've gravitated towards heavier gear in search of more control over the fish, better hook set percentages with weedless presentations, etc. 

 

I still use light-ish lines, with most being 12-15lb copoly and 40-50lb braid when necessary.