Syncthing's P2P design is awesome.
- Same software on all nodes. Central server is just a convention.
- Syncthing in written in Go, which has fantastic performance (which is important when you have a lot of files)
- Default interface is a Bootstrap admin panel, and clients can make interface such as Syncthing-GTK for better integration with operating system.
Why not ownCloud / Nextcloud
- This would have been easier since there was already an app for ClearOS but
- WebDAV is not an ideal protocol. Tiki has tried to use for it for years, but not so great results (performance, reliability, etc)
- The server and clients are different code bases, which is bigger long term workload.
- Can't do P2P sync. Everything needs to go via central server.