It's quite polished, mainly that. Even for a beta, there's almost no bugs, it respects Android Material You specs including animations, and it's highly customizable, allowing advanced filtering for example. It also adds very nice QoL features like automatically removing AMP links for full links.
Value is subjective, I personally consider it worthy of my money.

For me at least, part of it is a degree of "brand loyalty" because I used Sync for Reddit for a very long time. I paid I think 6$ for the pro version years ago and got absurd value for my money.

Now, the dev makes the move to Lemmy and enables an experience that is both very polished and very familiar. I don't mind paying a (one time) fee to support the dev in that setting.

Re: trackers, my current understanding is that all of that was attached to the ad system, and removing ads functionally removes the tracking. My pihole provides a good measure of cover too.

If someone wants to stick with another one, great, I hope it works well for them. I suspect I'll be happy here.

Not contrarian at all, just different preferences. The simple answer for many people is one of habit. Sync was the only way for many people to access Reddit for a long time (including me) and it just felt like home.

I personally am a big fan of Voyager as well and it's really nice to see the vibrant apps scene on Lemmy.

It was still there as of an hour ago.