Yea some found it inconsistent that he wanted to die in S1 and was happy to live in S3. First, his dying in S1, while wonderful in its own way, wasn’t the tightest or most obvious character point. I head-canon-ed it as being specific to that particular recreation of data and his experience as a prototyped recreation stuck in a machine.
But also, being stuck with Lore is a completely different experience and the way it played out made a lot of sense in the broader arc of Data’s journey. You can imagine Noonian Soong loving that his two children ended up this way.