The advantage of tapered wheelsets is that they are self-centering. In order to do so, the wagon or the truck follows a sine curve. A consequence of this is less wear on the surface because a bigger area is actually used. In fact, with an according profile, the wear becomes so that the shape of the profile remains the same, and reprofiling becomes necessary only after a rather long running distance.

With cylindrical wheelsets, it is the rim which has to do the centering/stabilizing, and there will simply be more wear because the centering is always connected with lateral friction. This is not thaat bad per se, but the lifespan of a wheelset is considerably shorter. And wear on the rails is greater too. It all ends up with higher maintenance cost (and more downtime for maintenance).

Hunting is an effect of the natural frequency of the truck. It is determined roughly by the wheel diameter and the wheelbase. It is always attempted to get that natural frequency excited at speeds higher than the maximum speed of the vehicle (known fact, a longer wheelbase makes the vehicle behaving better on straight track). When this is not possible, the sinus wave running has to be dampened. Today's state of the art is using (hydraulic) dampers. BART decided to use friction (wheel on rail, with cylindrical wheels).

Noise: it is pretty simple… friction means noise. The more friction, the higher the noise. There is a good example, with modern (electric) vehicles: the maximum tractive force can be reached when there is "micro-slip" between wheel and rail, which means that the wheel's circumference speed is just a little bit higher than the actual speed. The consequence is a very loud screeching, which disappears, as soon as that micro-slip state ends. I can remember this pretty well when the SBB Re450 locomotives were new at the S-Bahn Zürich, where maximum acceleration was requested. They had to "tame" them because the neighbors to the station stops complained (with good reasons) about the noise.