Muse Group could have taken a lesson from this with their (attempted?) addition of telemetry to Audacity. If the community feels a sense of ownership of the data that's being collected from said community, you'll probably receive less push back.
I used to use Dropbox as well, but it started freaking out when I had folders with over 500,000 files in them. I started writing scripts to zip up folders first, moved some things off Dropbox, but it would just take up several CPU cores when going through everything. I tried Syncthing, and it had zero issues with the number of files I had. Everything just worked. I was amazed that the free solution was so much better than the commercial solution for which I was paying $10+ each month.
I love Syncthing. I've found some unconventional uses for it in syncing program settings. My fonts folder is now synced between my Mac, Windows and Linux computers and that works surprisingly well. My projects folder does a one-way archive (like rsync) for backup to my home NAS and an offsite VPS. I have a Streamdeck that I use between my Mac and Windows work machines, and I sync the settings on that so it operates the same way regardless of which machine I plug it into. I love it.