I'm a convert to the idea of just having a cup full of Bic Cristal (cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, replaceable, 76 year old design) ball point pens. Whenever I temporarily misplace one, I just grab another from the cup as I find them. When I'm cleaning up, they all go back to the cup. However, his point about how hard you have to push to write is making me reconsider. On the other hand, I'm also not writing 42 inch high stacks of manuscripts like him.

The modern version of this is the Pilot G2. Scatter 'em around everywhere! 80% as good as fountain pens at 1% of the fussiness.

I have a Lamy 2000 (well, more than one...) that I adore for writing anything with any actual length. But I still scatter those G2s around.

I used to be a fan of Zebra Sarasa (retractable, not one of the variations) which I thought was better than the G2, but it wasn't always reliable (maybe they changed something), was more expensive, hard to find in stores (G2 are everywhere though), and accumulates a glob of ink when you draw a line across the page, which ends up wherever you next write something. I happen to have a G2 next to me so I'm testing it for the same problem now, and ended up with a glob somewhere along the long line. I cross things off of todo lists a lot or draw dividers between sections of the page so that happens all the time. Still, it might be a good compromise for the pressure issue for writing sentences.

Not that I'm that price sensitive, it is kind of nice: Sarasa ($2+ each, if you can find it), G2 (~1.25 each), Cristal ($0.10-$0.25 each)

The G2 definitely does glob. That's one of its bigger faults. (Others being that I, personally, prefer a line width between the 05 and 07 options -- obviously this is world-stoppingly critically important -- and that really old ones, I mean really old, tend to get disgusting sticky grips.)

Mostly they're just nice for being fairly rugged and reliable in a way most nicer pens just aren't, for carrying loads of ink, and for being ubiquitous. They're far from perfect. They're just... Good Enough™. And that's good enough!