Thanks for the additional context here. As someone who works for a company that pays for both databricks and snowflake, I will say that these results don't surprise me.

Spark has always been infinitely configurable, in my experience. There are probably tens of thousands of possible configurations; everything from Java heap size to parquet block size.

Snowflake is the opposite: you can't even specify partitions! There is only clustering.

For a business, running snowflake is easy because engineers don't have to babysit it, and we like it because now we're free to work on more interesting problems. Everybody wins.

Unless those problems are DB optimization. Then snowflake can actually get in your way.