Do any of you guys know what the benefit of letting them do it is?

The advantage boils down to

• You're sure it will work as expected.
• Spare you the effort of doing it yourself.

Is it worth it? Depends your skill level/interest in installing a new android on a phone (I have zero interest in doing that for example, and that is despite my computer running Linux), and what your time is worth to you (do you earn more in the time it would take you to do that yourself? If yes, it may be a reasonable choice to let someone else do it).

you support the project, thats it

also the very long warranty, if you install a OS yourself it voids it.

Mostly because they spend the time developing an O/S you want. I bought my first android (fairphone 3) from them, and my next will be from whatever people spend their effords on the firmware (e/os/, iodé, etc)

The major bummer is that Murena only support your phone if you keep the O/S version on it it was sold with. That seems somewhat nuts, but …

I did not buy the phone from Murena and installed it myself but it took me 3 attempts before everything was in good shape, so it is much more convenient to buy it pre-installed, which I'd maybe do next time (hopefully 10 years from now given the fairphone promise of being repairable).

Very happy with /e/ OS. I sponsor Murena a little by subscribing to their Workplace product, which works well. App backup works fairly well too, so redoing the install is not terrible, but I hope to avoid it from now on (⁀ᗢ⁀)