Yes it is scrypt.  What do you have against scrypt?  Litecoin uses it, amongst many others.  To my mind, scrypt is presently the closest thing to Satoshi's original vision... lots of people are able to participate in mining scrypt coins and it has been relatively stable without having to buy new hardware every 2 months like in the sha256 world.

The SXC client did have some problems with sync'ing the blockchain for a while, and development slowed to a crawl, but there has been a shakeup and now there are new people working on both the development and promotion side, so things are happening again and I sense more excitement in the community.  That is also why I think it is a good buy and I am holding for at least the next year to see where it goes.