What's the actual issue with iCloud? It takes three seconds to turn it on, and select what I want to sync. Done. Backing up, syncing calendars, contacts, and notes to all my devices with zero problem.
I'll admit I haven't tried yet, but I'm going to hazard a guess that if I try to setup icloud on my Linux machines at home or my Android devices, I'm not going to get very far.
With Dropbox I get all the way, everywhere, with no hassles. Thus Dropbox has my business.
makes sense for me. I don't use iCloud because of that. It doesn't have the features that I need. Although "Better" is subjective. Dropbox might not be better for you, but it "makes sense" for some people
I'm not sure I can answer generally but from a personal point of view currently my notes are not syncing with my iPhone - God knows why - and last year when my iOS update f'kd up and I had to wipe the phone my iCloud backup wouldn't restore - some kind of corruption. Luckily there was a 3 month old iTunes backup on my disk so I didn't lose all data. So it's not perfect.
Every cloud service needs a "delete, damn it, I really mean it" option, otherwise it seems their sync mechanisms are too conservative and resurrect things forever.
The main reason I pay for Dropbox is that simple model. I have a full copy on every machine, and if my internet connection fails, they go down, or something breaks I can just copy files like normal. If I see something odd, there's a full log & the ability to revert any changes.
There are times where boring is good and your core personal data is one of them.
It integrates really nicely to become the default document storage location for most (non-developer) apps as well.
The only trouble I had was to have it replace the "Documents" folder in the Dock so I could just treat it like a cloud version of the regular documents folder.