It is better in some ways, and worse in some, both largely subjective. It has a different license, is smaller, less battle tested, from different developers, designed with different goals in mind.

It Depends™ on how you judge.

All openrsync implements is the equivalent of a fast "cp -a" across the network, plus it can also remove files if they don't exist. rsync does much more and over the years I've used most of it, so there is no way I would use openrsync. The upside is the manpage of openrsync isn't that much more complex than cp, which is a definite bonus if that's all you are doing.

The only thing I would change about rsync is it's default, which IMO should be to copy all meta data supported by both sides. Ie, the default should be to make the destination as similar to the source as possible. It's default is to only copy the data, and you must add options to say what else you want copied. To make matters worse you can just add every option because if you say you want to copy something not supported by one side of the other it errors out. I may have missed it as I am reading the man page source, but openrsync didn't seem to change that.

No. openrsync implements the rsync protocol. It doesn't have all of its options, but the protocol is what it is. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?