I use 96KHz, over XLR. The reason for this is lower round-trip latency, for use with DAW plugins, and monitoring in real-time.
If I set my interface and DAW at 44.1KHz, with 128 samples, I get an overall latency of 10-12ms. That's the time it takes for the guitar signal to enter the interface, process through the DAW/plugins, and come back out the monitors.
When I set my interface and DAW to 96KHz, I get an overall latency of 3.65ms. It sounds great to my ears, and it feels correct, when monitoring in real-time.
If you haven't tried it, give it a shot, it may surprise some of the doubters out there.