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Happy to throw my two cents in as someone who has been really getting into his Thousand Sons recently.
Generally speaking, we're strong because we have decent baseline durability (we're a little bit harder to shift than normal marines), and then we put some especially good offense on top of that. More specifically, we can do things like taking up to 10 AP-1 flamers that can reroll to-wound in our basic battleline units. If we're not doing that, our backup option is to shoot AP-2 (boostable to AP-4) bolters and man portable assault cannons at the enemy. And all that is without getting into our psychic attacks and once per turn mortal wound ritual.
We also have some decent action monkey/scoring units to back up those beefy rubrics. Tzaangor of all sorts are pretty good at getting into position to perform actions or just screen out enemy deepstrikers while being cheap enough that you don't particularly mind when they die.
And on top of that, our army rule is just very flexible. We can use it to basically give ourselves Oath of Moment (with some failure points and without the +1 to wound). We can boost the AP of the shots we put into a particularly hard to kill target. We can toss around some mortal wounds. We can give some extra mobility to those flamer squads that are doing 10d6 hits before factoring in characters.
As for strong detachments, the Grand Coven is generally agreed to be both the best/strongest and the easiest to use. Sticky objectives help your probably-low-unit-count army score point swithout having to camp out on objectives as much. The ability to reroll psychic tests with a strat really helps out the math of the army rule. And being able to beef up your psychic attacks here and there can help you focus down hard-to-finish targets on a crucial turn. Also, the umbralefic crystal enhancement gives our heavy hitters a much needed mobility boost, and the incandaeum giving us even more mortal wounds against something with a high toughness stat is nice.
Most of the other detachments are *fine*, but they either require you really lean heavily into their gimmick or else have some low-key limitations that really get in their way. (Looking at you, Phalanx.)
So yeah. Our core units are more tough and killy than average. We have relatively cheap and mobile action monkeys/screens. We can throw a pile of buffs around to deal with especially hardy enemies. And on top of all that, we retain access to most of the conventional marine/CSM motor pool. So you can always mix in some predators or vindicators or whatever if you find you need more tank busting abilities.
Our biggest weaknesses in my experience are that:
* Our heavy hitters aren't super mobile by default. So once you commit them to an area of the battlefield, it can be hard to shift gears and get them into a new area. Try to think about the general path you expect them to take over the course of the battle before you deploy them.
* We tend to be kind of low unit count because our characters and rubric units are expensive. Which means it's easy to find ourselves without spare units for performing actions, holding objectives, etc. Tzaangor help with this a lot.
* We have anti-tank, but we don't necessarily have obvious, intuitive, cheap anti-tank the way many factions do. Like, we don't really have a devastator equivalent. So you'll want to figure out how you intend to kill tanks relatively early on in your army collecting. You'll most likely end up needing to invest in a few tanks or mutaliths or similar, and which approach you take may influence which detachments you go with and which other units you can easily fit into your list. All that said, AP-3/-4 S4 weapons on our basic rubrics rerolling to-wound, possibly with other buffs stacked on top of that can contribute significantly to your vehicle-killing needs.
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