the question doesn't help to achieve the learning goal you gave (maybe there is another that would fit better?). I'm sure that is the goal from which we came across this problem but I'd consider making the learning goal something that can be proven through the question.
The answer to this question changes with every dataset. I can imagine that there would be many cases where seeing if something is on the left vs the right (which would be data lost with random horizontal flipping) would be more important than cropping. I think since people don't have good knowledge of what datasets are out there and what the most pressing AI problems are, asking them to find, on average, the most destructive transformation would be difficult. Quick fix: give a specific dataset where one of the transformations would obviously lose valuable information.
@TheBguy87 Heyo, I have 2 suggestions: