When comparing Apathy vs Material Theme, the Slant community recommends Material Theme for most people. In the question“What are the best color themes for text editors?” Material Theme is ranked 17th while Apathy is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose Material Theme is:
The theme cleans up the interface so that all elements in the UI are easier to find without being distracting. The icons for each file type clearly define what the file is so there's no having to look too closely at file extensions. The color scheme choices (such as Oceanic Next Dark) in particular work well to distinguish functions, classes, keywords, properties, values, etc. for various languages.
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Pros

Pro Highly configurable
One of the only configurable syntax themes

Pro Custom tree view background image
Optional and looks awesome

Pro Semantic highlighting
Option to enable semantic highlighting for any un-scoped text.
Pro Improves Sublime Text's user interface
The theme cleans up the interface so that all elements in the UI are easier to find without being distracting. The icons for each file type clearly define what the file is so there's no having to look too closely at file extensions.
The color scheme choices (such as Oceanic Next Dark) in particular work well to distinguish functions, classes, keywords, properties, values, etc. for various languages.
Pro Visually appealing
Pro Full language support
Cons

Con No contrast between main view and panels
Makes it hard to distinguish what's what at a glance.
Con Developer pushes versions too often
Very little meat in each version. Has been known to dramatically change the color scheme.
