Not op, but I've used ddg for years. Imo ddg and brave are currently pretty much a wash. I've found that for some queries brave performs better, and for other queries ddg/bing performs better.

With both of them, i've found that in most (but not all) cases, if the results are bad, google's results are also bad.

I'll need to retrain my muscle memory to do "!d" instead of "!g" on unsatisfying brave results. I suspect that would let me drop google usage to basically zero.

I find them about the same, Brave supports most of the same bangs, though ddg is a bit faster and smoother UI wise and I think I prefer the overall design of the ddg results pages. Overall, I like them both with ddg just being a bit better because of it being around longer.

I like that Brave has it's own index. Will be interesting to see how it manages over time.