I have a site that has been mismanaged for years we have 12,000 pages of products are are drop shippers, at one time we ranked well but not anymore as no one has worked on site in about 4 years all our content is for supplier which is duplicate which out of the 12k in pages about 6k are duplicate content and 6k in pages have no content what so ever what is worse for our site at this point in time?
I agree. Duplicate content is a penalty and harder to recover from. None (or very little) content can still be optimized later or can still leave google to guess where you should be placed in the SERPS. I too have experienced both. No content is easy to fix by simply adding some, even just a little makes a difference.