didn't use sway for long enough to form an opinion. it did feel kind of workhorse-ish and boring which in hindsight is probably better. I was curious to see what I would get on a fairly old (intel iGPU) machine in terms of sheer performance with hyprland given it is fully GPU-accelerated through OpenGL and it was refreshing honestly. it's easy to see how they thought they could monetize it, pure looks and raw performance are very appealing to end-users.

the websites for both are a nice heuristic imo.

Sway is way more stable, just less eye candy (which is great). Hyperland is practically a fork (wlroots) by a single dev.