Some people do use all Major Arcana, and some decks - mostly collectors' editions though - only contain Majors.

I'm the reverse, I prefer the Minor and Courts when I read since they tell me much more about the nuances of a situation. I'm designing my own Tarot deck and so far I haven't even touched the Majors but have about 50-60% of the Minors/Courts done - partly cos I want to do collage for the Majors, and partly because I have more fun with the Minors. To me reading with the whole deck is much better than with Majors only, as it is like drawing using only oil pastel crayons - nice effect, but you can't get into the details. In fact I want the Minchiate tarot - you get an extra 20 cards to work with. And then I'll rework my "home-brew" deck to take account of the Minchiate cards, LOL. For me the more cards, the more specific you can get (and working with reversals you get 156 possible meanings just working with a standard tarot deck...) - and I find the "oracle" decks on the market like trying to copy a Durer drawing with a paint-roller!

You are very interesting when you say you enjoy this symbolic stuff - before I got into tarot, spirituality etc, I always used to hate it when in the introduction to books the editor went into too much detail about what the people in it were supposed to represent - and sometimes the most boring books to me were the ones where the characters were mere ciphers - "The Great Gatsby" springs to mind.

Now I guess I'm the other way round - I need to see symbolism where possibly there isn't any. But I see it anyway.

Oh, I never said I liked to look for symbolism, but it's just been a part of me since I was born.  I could always see symbolic nuances in everything.

So much the better. You knew where to find it and what you were looking for. It is a wide spectrum between reading hidden meanings into everything and not looking for symbology at all, and I am much to far over to the "everything" scale because I have learned it, whereas you are probably a natural intuitive and just "know" what you are looking at.

Another way of looking at it is analogising it to languages.  I'm a linguistic learner (we have to study different learning styles in this degree).  You have to learn the denotation for every card, that is to say, the textbook meaning, at first.  Otherwise it's like me telling you to read Japanese without you knowing the basic elements of the Japanese alphabets.  Once you learn the alphabet, you can combine the characters to make full words, which have meanings of their own.  Once you learn the denotation of each tarot card, you can combine them to find the connotation (that is, the mental image) of the juxtaposed images.  For those who don't know, juxtaposition is putting two images together to form a new meaning.  It's used a lot in advertising to imply things about success mostly.  A fairly plain example is having fit, athletic people using the latest invention to tone those abbs and firm those thighs.