I use both discord and irc, I vastly prefer irc for project discussion, but haven't exactly been able to pinpoint why. I think perhaps, for me, it's that topics tend to stay much more focused, but I understand this probably has to do with discord having servers>channels>threads and boards, where projects use some, but not all of them in the same way.
My only interests are in repairability, upgradability and ability run a Linux distro. If it meets those reqs, I'd then look at price and firmware openness. I've soldered on a GPU chip to my Thinkpad t480 and it was fairly easy. If I can do something similar with either of them I'd be interested.