So can anyone explain the disparity of the number in the stats between apps on Nostr? Damus is showing 5 zaps and Primal is showing 20 zaps for example.
(I’ve also gotten very used to writing in alt text for images and don’t see a way to do it at least with Damus.) 
Different apps using different relays and different subscriptions having different access to data to show the user.
Decentralization is chaos. My advice is to learn to love chaos!
It’s easier to adjust the mindset and accept that the stats are ultimately irrelevant. We’re here to connect, to share, to feel.
Nature of the protocol and how relays work. Not every client is going to pull information from the same relays and it seems, from my experience, that they also constantly recalculate and don’t cache/save earlier data. I regularly come back to a post that I already liked and had already gotten a bunch of likes and zaps, and I see it again with barely a few of its previous stats. I have to go to the post and refresh to get it to update and sync all the secondary data around the post again.
At least the #zap all clients should show the same number.
I understand that some clients avoid it, but in the future it will confuse more than one.
I don’t expect all apps to show precisely the same way since there may be some feature differences they are trying to achieve but if not everyone is seeing some core things the same way, that seems fairly problematic in my opinion.
Correct, the counting functionality of #zap should match all clients. If at any time we want Only zap replace the likes.
Do your clients both use the same relay list?
