First, best of luck to the class of 2022! I sincerely hope that you guys don’t experience any of the unfortunate circumstances that the classes of 2020 and 2021 had to experience. Make yourselves proud!
On the topic of university, as someone who lives in Western Sydney, the commute was a significant factor in choosing the university. Were this not an important factor to me, or something that I am not affected by, I would've likely been studying a Bachelor of Commerce at USyd. It takes me approximately 20 minutes to get to Parramatta and my campus (Parramatta City), being right next to the station, makes WSU highly convenient for me in terms of commute. Getting to USyd, on the other hand, would take me approximately an hour and 20 minutes. The whole commute thus becomes 40 minutes for WSU and 2 hours and 40 minutes for USyd.
As a WSU student who is about to begin his third year, I can say that the university (at least the School of Business) does not deserve the negative comments that it receives. The university is constantly putting in work and effort to improve its facilities and the programs that it offers. Consider the WSU-UNSW Collaborative Program for instance. Such a program is likely to bring substantial improvement to engineering education at WSU. Even UNSW, while still being a highly reputable university with respect to engineering, will benefit from this collaboration. I believe the problem has a lot more to do with the Western Sydney region (which I agree is not great) rather than Western Sydney University, which is no longer the university it was prior to 2015.
Of course, while I do love WSU, I am also highly interested in studying at USyd and this is why I intend to pursue further study there at some point in the future since I am definitely someone who is interested in gaining different educational perspectives from different institutions.