The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon:
"We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
or even the post-coital after-images of VR
"His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall."
My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement.
Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.