I was tempted by Coda 2 when it launched on sale – and really excited by the prospect of Nova – but didn't go for either, and I'm glad in retrospect. In its way, Nova seems really cool and has a great deal of care and soul, but it also seems hyper-focused. It seems largely designed to be "Xcode for the web" (and for PlayDate). If my taste were precisely in sync with Panic's, then I'd be perpetually dazzled, and if I were making tons of money from web development every day, then it might easily be worth the initial cost (and the ongoing cost for future upgrades).
But I've tried the Nova trials a few times, and my taste seems to veer slightly in too many ways. Xcode is intended for industrial-grade, commercial projects, and I've always thought of the spirit of the web as something more money-free and fueled by labours of whimsy, good will and enthusiasm wherever possible. Honouring some of the efforts of people who have worked on providing openly-available tools which are in many respects equally good – and even more amenable to users' taste – just kind of feels right.
Another aspect: Nova also seems super-supportive of people who want to make extensions, dedicating a whole sub-site to developing and releasing them. But it's been a year and a half, and nobody has come up with an extension for extensive treatment or debugging of Stylus or CoffeeScript, two popular preprocessors I'm never without. (Nova advertises built-in support for CoffeeScript, but that seems to amount to quite basic syntax highlighting.) I could invest a little time and write an extension, I'm sure, but if I'm paying so much for this tool, I feel like it's reasonable to expect this all to be there already, and better than the free apps. Meanwhile, one VS Code extension does everything I want and more, and all I had to do was learn how to search for and install an existing extension. That's just one little thing, and for me, there are at least a half-dozen similar things.
Following its heart has always been a mark of Panic. That means a smaller audience, I applaud their success having stuck to that, and I wouldn't dare change it.