It finally made my node useful as a daily driver for me. Connecting to it over Tor is way too slow and unreliable, and setting up a lightning address to use with Start9 can be a massive pain right now. They've been promising this will be easier when the next update arrives, but no ETA on it. Then Alby comes along and makes it trivial.
I do wonder what the privacy trade-offs are, and how much info Alby has access to about transactions and balances on my node due to using Alby Hub. My assumption is they have access to all of it, and I just have to hope they aren't tracking or storing that information.