Just a historical note; back in the '70s when polyester was still the glop du jour (before the epoxies, and S glass, and vinylesters, etc.), the entire marine industry sprayed,troweled, and hand rolled polyester resin and cloth into, and on to just about every production boat on the market. Then a few years later they learned about 'shortcuts' and started to see just how little resin to cloth they could get away with, ( and they were on the right track since a lower resin to cloth ratio is actually a stonger bond). But in many cases "R & D projects" were sold to consumers who raised their sails, and left the dock.
THEN a few years later during haul outs people would notice little 'blisters' protruding through the bottom paint of their hulls. It almost looked like pizza. Apparently 'osmotic blistering' was
now becoming an epidemic and people were getting LEAKS in their supposedly impregnable hulls.
Turns out that the only sure cure for the issue was to go in and physically dig out each individual blister, (making sure that you got ALL of it out), and then filling in the resultant cavity with- epoxy.
Wooden Boat magazine had a GREAT time with all of this (after all polyester was what pretty much shut down many traditional boatbuilding shops), and dubbed the offending blisters as being sure signs of a major infestation of the "polyestermites". They even did a tongue in cheek article describing the dangers of this creature, and they did it SO well that before long many boatyards were being overwhelmed with boat owners who wanted to have said "bugs" removed from their hull. Many insurance companies wound up paying for entire bottoms to be ground off and completely resurfaced, with -epoxy.
While each product has it's own characteristics from an artisan's viewpoint I have to say that epoxies are much easier to be around as they don't produce the "Bondo smell" which polyesters permeate (and that lingers in your shop for a long time...). As PeterJ points out above epoxies are thermoreactive meaning that you can control curing time by controlling the temperature of the space you are working in. Polyesters rely on differing proportions of the resin, and MEK which is the primary catalyst. A few drops more/less of MEK and your project can cure in either minutes, or months...AND a polyester skin can glaze/crack as it doesn't have anywhere near the inherent strength of epoxy.
Joe is certainly on target when he points out that we rarely get much call for submerged signage these days. But if I want to finish up a project, and not get a call back, I'll go with the epoxy every time.