I don't remember when I tried it for the first time, but I did like it much better than the new opera. At least they were adding new features much faster. It was still different enough and lacking (to me) important features from the old opera. I still have it installed today as the fallback for the exceedingly rare case that some site doesn't work in Firefox and I really need to access it. But I have to admit that I didn't really bother to evaluate it properly in a long time. An ex colleague doing webdev just recently told me it's his primary browser as it has some nice things to make his life easier that were just more cumbersome to set up in chrome. I just gave up and accepted that at least by using Firefox I'm fighting the engine-monopoly of chrome/blink. ;)
did you give a try, is it even remotely comparable ?