Which license should I aim to publish articles & software under? Suppose I have the choice of license under which to publish my research work in Computer Science (constituting scientific papers and software) online; and that I need to make this decision before any journal or conference has accepted any of it. Specifically, suppose for the sake of discussion my academic employer would accept whatever it is I choose.

So, what to do, what to do... Is "better" or worse to put things in the public domain (e.g. via a CC0 dedication or otherwise), or to have a more rigid license? The FSF seems to be pretty critical of Creative Commons licenses, yet these can be seen at, say, arXiv... plus, I'm not sure I want to be all that legalistic with a 1000 pages of license text.

What should guide me when choosing the license, then? And what does your "licensing experience" teach you?
CC licenses are good for the written word, but you need a software license for software. You're going to have to have two licenses at the very least. On top of that, depending on your publication venue, you may not have a choice of license. Many venues require the transfer of copyright in order to publish, so your license for your articles may not matter once you give up your copyright.

To answer your question directly, for publicly funded work, I prefer the 3-clause BSD over public domain for software, but this is partially due to my institution's requirement to either use GPLv2 or BSD for software. For documentation CC-BY is my preference, and I have no institutional requirements there. I have these preferences because I believe that publicly funded work should be as open and free as possible to the people (i.e. the public) that funded it, but I adhere to an academic perspective that credit should be given where credit is due.