Picard! You can love them both, and the series they captained, but if forced to choose in a hair-brained but lovable exercise like this, then you had better remember who it was that made you really wish it were all REAL.

Picard.

And Stewart was the better, more nuanced actor, with a greater range of emotions, more complex responses to situations, etc. Not that any of that really matters, if you just want an ass-kicking, John Wayne-type dude on your bridge.

For real, though, Kirk lost so many red-shirts in his landing parties that one had to wonder where he was able to constantly recruit more in the middle of nowhere like that. But he made up for a few of those squandered lives by kissing Uhura!

But Picard gets it. A Klingon, after all, chose him to defend him. And he survived being transformed into a Borg. And he survived Romulan torture ("There are 4 lights!"). And he defended the "human" rights of an android...