I do not think this is a hot take either, if you've put any real amount of time into both I think this is the only conclusion you can come to. I'm not really a longposter so I'm just going to bullet point my way through here real quick.
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The user interface is just better. Even works with paws on. I like buttons too, but the average punter can operate a touch screen while plastered. Probably. If you know what you're after, it's way faster, and it's otherwise more responsive, intuitive (and I hate that word), and just overall better.
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Sound is better too. This is a very low bar to clear, sound on modern DDR cabs isn't great, but it is cleared easily.
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If you like old DDR, it's got more good old DDR songs than new DDR does. The shit people were bangin' out back in the day. Obviously there's no Konami licensed songs, but there's plenty of other stuff. Good stuff, just no anime music.
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Pads are good. My experience is limited but I'm willing to bet a big five dollars that SMX pads will continue to feel good when given the Dave & Busters treatment for years than a DDR pad will. Plenty of DDR pads out there feel god awful because they're not carefully maintained.
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Timing is better. Timing on modern arcade DDR sucks ass and I will not accept any arguments otherwise. You can make it work fine at home but on Actual Arcade Cabinets it's crap, has been since they swapped to PC hardware in X. High level players go to a lot of trouble to replicate the actually bad, but official timing of arcade cabinets and I think that's dumb.
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You want a cab? You can buy one, directly from Step Revolution. They have multiple types of cabs even. Or you can just buy the stages and a monitor with the software running on it. It's not cheap, no, but compared to buying any DDR cab that was supposed to have an LCD in it, it sure is. And you can just go throw that on network, no fuckery.
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You an op? You can run the cab properly, on network, without paying a cut to Step Revolution or dealing with weird private network fuckery. And the pads work better so you have less insufferable tank top wearing sweaty nerds asking about the sensors.
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The company that sells the game does, probably, give a fuck about the people actually playing the game. I'm sure some of the devs at Konami care, but do you think Konami cares at all about the end user experience past it being enough to get mroe credits? Hell no. SR seems to actually want to make a game worth playing, both for old sticks in the mud such as yours truly as well as the typical drunk punter wanting to give it a go.
I still get if people want to play DDR, because it's DDR, that's fine. But it's not the better game, not by a long shot. And I think it's worth going out of one's way to play SMX instead, if you really care about such things.
I would personally love if they sold a version of the game that ran on regular PCs, since I haven't the money or space for a cab or any part of one (and play keyboard).