I think the complexity of Iceberg is overblown. It's just a table format and it's strictly better than the Hive-style /schema/table/partition_key=partition_valu

I think the complexity of Iceberg is overblown. It's just a table format and it's strictly better than the Hive-style /schema/table/partition_key=partition_value/one_of_many_files.parquet It has a lot of knobs to fiddle with (more than Delta Lake, which tries very hard to come up with good defaults), but even if you don't touch any of them, you already end up with tables that are as good as Hive's, except now your writers don't break your readers. This is already a massive boon that lets you escape the rigidity of a timetable schedule for your data pipelines. Anything else you can come up with (switching your table to MOR and rewriting it as a separate step etc) is further improvements.