A few tips about tents:
Ease of erection is vital! Count how many pegs you need, figure out what procedure you have to follow to get the damn thing up. Imagine doing it in the dark, after a very long day, with the wind making the pouring rain blow sideways. My tent is pretty good: I have to feed one pole through, then bang in 6 pegs. I keep the tent itself and the fly one inside the other, so there is only one job to do, not tent then fly as well, and this helps quite a bit, as does having the tie-down points on tent and fly being the same so that you wind up with 6 pegs in the tent, 6 pegs in the fly, but only 6 pegs total. I'd like it to be easier still, but I haven't found anyuthing suitable yet.
It needs to be fast, and easy enough to do in the dark and rain. (For my tent, if it's not raining or threatening to rain it doesn't get used at all.) If the tent is a P in the A to set up, making camp becomes a chore.
This, by the way, is the best thing about my method: from a standing start, I can be in bed with the kettle on in 5 minutes, with all the essentials handy enough to reach without getting cold (lantern, pipe and tobacco, book to read, laptop, gloves, woollen cap, alarm clock to wake me up before dawn, milk for tea and some nibbly things in the esky. Now, if I could just figure out a way to take a piss without having to get out of bed and put my shoes back on ....)
It needs to be waterproof, and to stand up OK to bad weather. (I imagine that this is a major, major factor in the US - remember that here in Oz, you basically only see snow if you are one of those fruitcakes who pretend to like sliding down hills with glorified floorboards strapped to your feet while they order another triple Bundy and Coke in the disco.)
It needs to be easy enough to get into and out of. With small tents (ones you can't stand up in) it can be a pain getting in and out.
It needs a vestibule to put your boots and stuff in. If it hasn't got one, and a generous-sized one at that, don't bother, it will be a pain. Remember that if you hit bad weather, you might have to spend practically the whole day in it, so you need the ability to run your camping stove - which you cant do inside the tent proper.
Small size when packed is good. I don't care how big your car is, you will soon find that you have a great pile of gear, and a vast great palace of a tent doesn't help. Don't pay too much attention to the ridiculous little bags they pack them into in the shop. They always make them much too small so that they look tiny and efficient in the showroom. In reality, you need a half hour, a good command of the seedier parts of the English language, and a black belt in ju-jutisu to get the bastard back in the bag after you've used it. So get yourself a slightly larger bag of some kind. (I use an ordinary shopping bag.)
Make sure the bloody thing is long enough! Most 1 and 2 man tents are designed for the comfort of a Japanese midget. If you can't stretch out to your full height, and have a litlte room to spare, buy something else.
Sealing? Never needed to use anything. It keeps the rain out, what more do I need?
