[ineedasername]

prefer an explicit JOIN

Yes absolutely, and not just for performance benefits. It's much easier to track what, how, and why you're joining to something when it's not jumbled together in a list of a dozen conditions in the WHERE clause.

I can't tell you how much bad data I've had to fix because when I break apart the implicit conditions into explicit joins it is absolutely not doing what the original author intended and it would have been obvious with an explicit join.

And then in the explicit join, always be explicit about the join type. don't just use JOIN when you want an INNER JOIN. Otherwise I have to wonder if the author accidentally left off something.