That was an interesting read, I was not aware that we got this info from the horse's mouth.

Vivaldi has been criticized because it appears to phone home a lot. I've not tested that myself, but I assumed it was true. I might give it another shot because I do enjoy its Opera-like feel over Chrome or Chromium.

Honestly, what is there to support? Once you strip Chromium of all the code that uses any Google services, more than half the job is done.

Vivaldi is not just another repackaged Chromium, it has it's own completely custom UI and special features. For example, it has built-in mail, rss, calendar, and contacts "apps", and a built in screenshot tool that lets you capture an entire page or a single element.

Features like that are why you would want to use Vivaldi over another Chromium-based browser. I don't even know if they actually went through the effort of a thorough de-Googling. Also, their custom UI is not open source, so the browser is partially proprietary.