Commercial land mobile radio Andy. It’s all to do with offering better services for commercial users, group calling, 1 to many, selective calling, trunking etc. along with encryption and much better frequency use. DMR gets 2 voice channels and data backchannel in the same bandwidth as a normal FM voice channel. It’s the commercial world where all this is important.
Amateurs get DV systems built out of the building blocks used in commercial divisions of the companies… For amateurs the benefits are less obvious. There’s the theoretical advantage that a DV signal with enough error correction will have a better audio performance than FM at the same signal level. Of course the real world is often very different. On top of that unless you are into linked repeaters the advantage of DV rapidly dwindle to nothing too obvious for amateurs. Especially as none of the systems allow you to use the set as a mobile 9k6/4k8 modem. That would have been cool to be able to send data from your phone (a spot message say) via Bluetooth to your Yaesucomwood handy which squirted it into the repeater network where it could be routed on and out to the internet somewhere. Likewise low res browsing etc. back to the phone. So many opportunities missed by the makers who have built a number of walled gardens as they see trunked voice as the be all.
Still if my handy broke tomorrow, I’d buy an FT70 at once. It’s proven to be well built and viable for SOTA work on 2m FM and you get 70cms and Yaesu’s C4FM system for free. And if I had one I’d have a call on C4FM every time I was out SOTAing.
I had a DSTAR handy but only sold it as it had very poor RF performance on 2m compared to other 2m radios FM or DSTAR. It was basically just a dead weight to be carried if there was a sniff of commercial gear near by. And it was an Icom handy so it had 200million zillion functions and an arcane menu system that meant you need Encyclopedia Icomia with you to use it 