It's faster, written in TypeScript and has 99% test coverage along with integration tests against a testnet. I'm also aiming to simplify the steemd APIs instead of just providing a 1:1 call wrapper as shown here with the account creation.

But I understand your point. I started out using steem-js and even have a commit or two in the project but to be honest I didn't like the smell of the code... and barging in to a established project and saying "Hi! I'm new here. I'm going to rewrite all your things in my own opinionated way" usually don't go over well :) I also recently wrote a WebSocket RPC client that I could reuse a lot of code from.