Yeah, agreed. I was a Databricks skeptic when I first came across it, but it's value goes a LONG way beyond just managing Spark.

For example, we found that Databrick's Spark (or their 'Delta engine' or whatever it's called) had 50-60% better performance on our workloads than than 'core' Spark. I guess that's not surprising when a large proportion of Spark contrionutors work for you and can performance tune! Not to mention things like MLFlow and all their data engineering stuff.

This is a cool project, and I admire it's ambition, but saying it's a real 'alternative' to Databricks is a bit disingenuous.