Here's a quick contrast.
Synthetic Short
if I have 10k in my UVXY gambling account and I want to do a synthetic short, I will be required to keep lots of cash so that I can *probably* escape the short call if UVXY skyrockets. I put together a simulated synthetic short in TD Ameritrade at the $10 strike for Jan 2019 and the "effect on buying power" would be $8.19 per share! Buying the position itself would require another $0.42 debit per share. TL;DR: With my $10k I could harness about 1,100 shares this way. The sidelined cash reduces leverage to ~-1.1X and risk is still unlimited. Worse, my broker will force me out of the position if a typically brief volatility event occurs and I come anywhere close to not having enough cash on the sidelines to buy UVXY at whatever it's spiked to. However, the delta on this trade is a whopping 0.93, so you're earning 93% of the inverse of UVXY.
Long Put
Had I bought long puts instead, there would be no requirement to hold cash on the sidelines. I could spend 100% of my account on puts. My risk would be that they all expire worthless - a 100% loss, actually less than above. If I'm buying Jan 2019 puts at the $10 strike for today's price of ~ $6.17 per share my $10k account could harness 1,600 shares or ~-1.6X leverage. Plus there would be no risk of being assigned/forced out/margin called; I could ride out a price spike and recover. The only downsides are I would no longer be theta neutral and my delta would be A LOT lower. E.g. these puts have a delta of -0.15, so UVXY would have to fall $1 for my put to increase from $6.17 to $6.32 (a whopping 2.4%)(in all fairness, the price of the put would eventually converge).
Summary
So for tomorrow's $1 fall in price and all other factors being equal, the synthetic short earns me ~0.93 * 1100 shares = $1023 and the long put earns me ~0.15 * 1600 shares = $240. However, the two trades are incomparably different in risk. With the long put, I risk losing 100% of my investment if UVXY is above $10 in a year, and some of my investment if it is above $3.83 but less than $10. With the synthetic short, however, my risk is unlimited. More importantly, I am highly likely to be stopped out at a loss during the next North Korean missile test or inflation blip. The odds of losing are much higher for the synthetic, hence the 4X higher (in the short-term) reward. It might be tempting to just buy SVXY given the low leverage of the synthetic short + cash, and skip the whole assignment risk thing.