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Avoiding nocturnal species, you probably don't want an A. aculeatus or O. briareus. Bimacs are typically day active assuming you can find one. I got 2 great octos from Saltwaterfish.com and they were O. filosus/hummelincki (Caribbean 2-spot octopus). They were very active. One of them would play tug-of-war with my fingers, even come to me when I splashed my fingers in the water. The other one wouldn't have anything to do with me, but was always out in the open where I could see it. Unfortunately both of them were very short lived in my care for unknown reasons. Could very well have just been their time.
Cuttles are fun too. I haven't gotten to keep any, but they are absolutely amazing creatures. From my observations they don't appear to have the personality like an octo, as you said. But, each individual is always going to be different. Cuttles are nice because you don't have to worry about them climbing out of the tank, and you can keep them with corals.
As for being hardy, I think they are all relatively hardy ONCE ESTABLISHED. The hard part is pretty much out of the keepers hands; collection and shipping methods. I've passed quite a few octos lately because of "missing arms" due to the method the animals were collected by. Some people who offer them online buy them dirt cheap from trappers after they've been mangled by the lobsters and whatever other fish they catch in their traps. I had to cancel and get a refund on a baby Briareus I won on Ebay a while back, because the animal "mysteriously" disappeared after I won it... and then was found missing all of its arms in the filtration of the tank. I would avoid Ebay for octos.
You should join TONMO.com since you're so interested. There are a ton of octo/cuttle keepers on the board there, and it's a very active ceph forum. There are even a few marine bio folks with lots of interesting information.
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