How come Syndra isn't played more?

my guess is it's pretty tough to land Q's against the prevalent mobile champs these days.

and overall just a tricky champion to play. why play her when you can consistently land Lux's E from halfway across the lane for example

Probably because she is somewhat difficult to play.

In the early game you can run out of mana very quickly and her damage isn't great. The only CC she has is dependent on 2 ability cooldowns (Q+E) and can be tricky to hit so she is rather easy to gank. Her ult while powerful is rather slow to take full effect.

She is really fun to play though, throwing minions and monsters around really makes you feel powerful.

they took 20 or so base damage off her q and was considered trash after that similar to

From what I've played against her abilities are easy to dodge and don't do enough damage. Also I don't think people like the micro-ing of the orbs so they go to someone else :)

I really like playing Syndra, but her learning curve is super high, since she has a huge amount of skill shots. Unlike Lux who has some safe skillshots like her E. She has a shield with her W, and her Q can hit two people at once plus Lux has a longer range that Syndra. The other reason I don't belive she get's played that much is because she doesn't have enough SAFE skills. Meaning if you miss your combos you can get punished if you're not careful.

she does obscene damage and scales beautifully into lategame, but she's probably the most unsafe champion her role is to delete squishies, but her effective range isn't nearly as high as you would expect, meaning that she has to find a way to get in their faces before she can ult them. couple this with the fact that her only reliable cc is a stun that most beginners have serious trouble landing, and you have a champion most people will feed on. she's not mechanically difficult, and she's definitely not underpowered, she just relies so heavily on kiting, positioning, and a good frontline that most people disregard her before they have a chance to get good at her.

you just have to have confidence. you can't play her like lux or anivia or ziggs or whatever. if you miss her skills, you usually die. if you land them, the entire enemy team dies.

Because Syndra is a champion that you can't just win with by mashing keys, unlike Annie, LB, Fizz, Yasuo, Zed and all the other mid laners. She has a high skill foor, and a higher skillcap. So, unless you put in a lot of time and effort to learn and master her, you don't perform all that well -- and we all know how League's community feels about the concept of thought and effort.

TL;DR: Kids are too lazy, Syndra too hard, boo hoo.