When comparing Material Theme vs Ayu, the Slant community recommends Ayu for most people. In the question“What are the best color themes for text editors?” Ayu is ranked 3rd while Material Theme is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Ayu is:
Comes in three different variations: Ayu Dark, Ayu Light, Ayu Mirage
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Comes in three variants
Comes in three different variations: Ayu Dark, Ayu Light, Ayu Mirage
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.